In Confidence to Members
OLCC(1977) 1A
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
OVERSEAS LABOUR CONSULTATIVE COMMITTEE
ITEM 3:
HONG KONG
PROFESSOR TURNER'S INTERIM AND PROVISIONAL REVIEW OF LABOUR RELATIONS
1. A summary of Professor Turner's interim review is at the annex to this Paper.
2.
The report concludes that outside the Public Service there are no trade unions playing, or likely to play, an effective role in industrial relations even though there are good social, economic and labour market reasons why, an effective labour movement should have emerged. This is not due to restrictive legislation but is attributed by Professor Turner to the present unwillingness of the dominant trade union organisation -the left-wing Federation of Trade Unions to take up that role, and to the ineffectiveness of the minority right-wing unions grouped under the Hong Kong Trades Union Council. In the absence of effective trade unions, the long Kong Labour Department has been compelled to assume a protective role which the report finds that it discharges with some considerable
success.
3. Nevertheless, surveys carried out by one of Professor Turner's associates, Dr Patricia Fosh, have provided evidence that employees feel the need for alternative arrangements which will secure for them general improvements in social and employment conditions: for example, better social services, education, housing and medical services; pensions and sickness benefits and greater job security. The employees, though sceptical of existing trade unions, emerged as strongly collectivist in attitude, and in favour of arrangements based on some kind of joint or representative action.
4.
Professor Turner arrives at three tentative conclusions:-
1. Hong Kong needs some kind of general legal minimum wage,
probably of the "safety net" variety characteristic of the United States, but requiring further study to decide on its principles and methods of determination.
2.
There is a critical gap in labour relations at the work- place level, with which neither the major unions nor the Labour Department have been very actively concerned, but which requires a distinctive approach in the special circumstances of Hong Kong. The extension of joint consultation on voluntary or compulsory lines would not fill the gap: further work is needed to find a solution.
1
13.