1.
ii
Communication of information about vacancies:
The high density of industrial establishments and Hong Kong's
small size makes for ease of communication in the labour market:
factories of different type are often crowded together in the same
building and workers are commonly supposed to spend much time
enquiring about openings elsewhere. Lunchtime sightseeing tours,
word of mouth information (which Hong Kong's cheap and ubiquitous
telephone helps to spread) and factory-wall posters advertising
vacancies are the most common means of finding out about available
jobs. The firms make some use of newspaper and TV advertising, and,
for high grades of labour, may make direct contact with a potential
employee (poaching). These information flows are generally so
effective that few workers ever call up the government's employment
services, which fills a minimal number of jobs annually, mostly for
non-manual workers. Some government departments help to bring
employees and applicants together, eg the industrial training sec-
tion of the Labour office, the Marine Department, etc. Firms which
are desperately short of labour have been known to tour housing
estates in buses; and the system of paying employees a recruitment
bonus for limited periods of shortage has been adopted in the
fastest growing manufacturing industries (eg electronics).
All of this implies a relatively free, competitive labour
market, in which information is in itself no restraint on worker
mobility. But there are some sectors where workers depend on
intermediaries to find them employment: the traditional pattern of
Chinese employment, which probably persists in some sectors,
(eg trade), emphasised particularism at the expense of open competi-
tion. In such a situation jobseekers depend on family and friends
to serve an introduction to employment: this particularism lends
itself to a narrower view of the labour market and to restricted
information about the availability of jobs. Again, workers may be
tied to a particular foreman or master. More commonly, where
labour sub-contracting is normal (construction, docks), casual
workers often congregate in known tea houses which act as informal
employment exchanges and they depend on the middleman's access to
the contractor for knowledge about job opportunities.
These observations, however, reflect differences in the labour
relations typical of various industries, more than imperfections of