Chapter 2.
OCCUPATIONS, wages AND LABOUR ORGANIZATION.
Primary Products and Commerce.
Primary products in Hong Kong are limited by reason of the territory's small area; the prospects of the fishing industry are bright, but its expansion will necessarily be gradual and the fisherfolk are in any case a race apart in that they live aboard their boats and are by habit self sufficient and migra- tory, thus forming a literally floating population.
The people who make Hong Kong their home are primarily engaged in commerce. Hong Kong's magnificent natural harbour has made it inevitably the main entrepôt of South China's trade, both inward and outward. The majority of the working population is thus engaged in occupations concerned with the import and export business, shipping, ship- building and ship repairing, stevedoring, etc., and it is from such occupations that most of the Colony's wealth is derived.
Local Industry.
Before the war against Japan local industry, as opposed to industries ancillary to the entrepôt trade, such as ship repairing, had been expanding rapidly; raw materials from the Pacific area were available at low cost and a ready supply of comparatively cheap labour was to hand, so that the deve- lopment of local industries such as the refining of Java sugar and the manufacture of footwear from Malayan raw rubber was natural and rapid. During the earlier years of the Sino- Japanese conflict-1937-1941-uncertainty and instability in China contributed further to the growth of such industries. The reconstruction of these local industries has been slower than that of occupations bound up more closely with the entrepôt trade and their future is still dependent to a great extent on local production costs which have greatly increased and on unknown factors governing world trade as a whole.
Labour Office.
The Labour Office was first established in 1938 as a sub- department of the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs and was re-established as part of that secretariat for the immediate post-war period, September, 1945 - June, 1946. At the end of June, 1946, it was set up as a separate and independent department. Throughout the Military Administration and almost up to the end of 1946 staffing presented a perpetual difficulty since such personnel as were available were mostly inexperienced and were subject to frequent transfers. the end of the year staffing problems were to some extent solved and the following personnel had been assigned to the department from the permanent staff of the Civil Govern-
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