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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
1959, represent a most important advance in the limitation of hours worked by women and by young persons under the age of 18 in industrial employment. By the Regulations the maximum daily period of employment, exclusive of overtime, is to be limited to 12 hours and the maximum hours, exclusive of overtime, which may be worked to 10 hours in a day or 60 hours in a week. A weekly rest day must be given to all women and young persons. Provision is made, however, for women and young persons of or over the age of 16 to work an additional hour as overtime, up to an aggregate total of 100 hours in a year for any one industrial undertaking. This overtime is to be worked in not more than 25 weeks in the year. Young persons under the age of 16 may only work 8 hours in a day and are not allowed to be employed over- time. The Regulations prohibit more than 5 hours' continuous work without a break of at least half an hour in the case of women and young persons of 16 and over, or of one hour in the case of young persons under 16. Time limits for beginning and finishing work are also laid down, but special provisions allow these to be varied in the case of concerns operating on a scheme of shift work; night work between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. continues to be prohibited. Special provision is made for the extension of the overtime allowance to 150 hours in the year for the purpose of meeting seasonal or exceptional pressure of work; for the reckoning of overtime by reference to the individual worker and not to the industrial undertaking; for the declaration of separate sets of workers or parts of an industrial undertaking as separate undertakings for the purposes of reckoning overtime; and for transitional arrangements for the first six months of the operation of the Regulations. The Regulations also require the keeping of registers of women and young persons, the posting of notices of the period of employment and of intervals for meals and rest, and the making of returns of overtime work.
The Factories and Industrial Undertakings (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations, 1958, which were approved by the Legislative Council on 3rd December 1958, made certain amendments of a technical nature to the Regulations approved in November.
The next step in the Government's declared policy of raising minimum standards of employment generally is an Industrial Employment (Holidays with Pay and Sickness and Maternity