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II
SUMMARY OF ADDITIONAL POINTS MADE BY THE STAFF SIDE
The Staff Side of the Senior Civil Service Council have studied with care the First Report on Civil Service Pay by the Standing Commission on Civil Service Salaries and Conditions of Service. Phile there is no agreed Staff Side position concerning certain aspects of the Report, they have unanimously proposed that the effective date for implementing the Report should be 1 April 1979 instead of 1 October 1979. In recommending the revised pay scales the Standing Commission has not, according to paragraph 4.1 of the Report, taken into account the increase in the cost of living or in private sector salaries since 1 April 1979, and therefore by recommending the date of implementation of the Report as of 1 October 1979 all civil servants would in effect be deprived of an upward pay adjustment for at least 6 months. In the absence of any cogent financial or economic arguments which could be advanced by the Standing Commission (and the Staff Side submit that there are none), they consider that such a recommendation is illogical and unreasonable.
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Subject to the above, the Association of Expatriate Civil Servants of Hong Kong considers that the Report should be accepted as it stands in principle subject to further discussions being held to look at a number of points including those concerning individual grades and subject to those points being reviewed by the Commission with scope for changes in due course.
3.
The following comments on the Report represent the agreed views of the H.K. Chinese Civil Servants Association and the Senior Non-Expatriate Officers Association.
General Points
(a) These two associations are of the opinion that the
Standing Commission should have considered that consultative arrangements be established first as a matter of urgency so that the present discontent of individual grades could have been settled through such appropriate consultative machinery and procedures. It has therefore been proposed that some means of consultation between the Standing Commission and the Senior Civil Service Council be established regarding the Commission's future programme.
(b) The lack of an appropriate and relevant appeal body makes
it difficult for complaints and grievances from individual grades to be properly ventilated and adjudicated with the result that some present issues cannot be settled in an impartial and amicable manner.
/(c)