HONG KONG
LEGAL REPORT
THE EMPLOYMENT (AMENDMENT) ORDINANCE 1980
(No. 10 of 1980)
Enclosure No. 2
The scope and purposes of the Employment Ordinance include the regulation and general conditions of employment. The Factories and Industrial Undertakings Ordinance, while principally concerned with health and safety at work, also made provision for regulating the general conditions of employment of women and young persons in industry. This led to some over- lapping of scope between the 2 statutes. It was therefore considered desirable to rationalize the law so that the Employment Ordinance would deal with all measures of a social nature relating to employment, leaving the Factories and Industrial Undertakings Ordinance to deal with health and safety at work. The object of this Ordinance is to so provide.
2. Section 3 of the Ordinance repeals section 16 of the Employment Ordinance. That section disapplied Part IV of the Ordinance (which deals with rest days) in relation to employment of women and young persons in industrial undertakings and to whom the Factories and Industrial Undertakings Ordinance applied. Under the new scheme rest days for women and young persons vill be regulated by the Employment Ordinance and, consequently, section 16 is no longer appropriate.
3. Section 6 extends the powers under section 72 of the Employment Ordinance relating to the entry and inspection (and related matters) of places of employment by including povers similar to those contained in section 4 of the Factories and Industrial Undertakings Ordinance.
4.
Section 7 brings into the Employment Ordinance provisions corresponding to those contained in the Factories and Industrial Undertakings Ordinance. These deal with the non-disclosure by public officers of the origins of complaints against employers in respect of contraventions of the Ordinance, the non-termination by the employer of the employment of his employee by reason of the employee giving evidence in proceedings for the enforcement of the Ordinance and presumptions relating to the age of persons and whether women, young persons or children are to be considered as working in places of employment.
5. Section 8 broadens section 73 of the Employment Ordinance (which confers a pover on the Governor in Council to make regulations) by including provisions firstly, to empower the Commissioner for Labour in special circumstances to increase_the hours of employment that employees can work in industrial under- takings and secondly, to deal with evidential matters.