6
A PERSONAL VIEW
A Taoist priest reverently blessed the project, when Mr Thompson thrust the first spade into the ground to begin the rushed programme of excavation in November. A symbolic sketch of a tree carrying the Chinese characters 'Growing For You' is the adopted symbol of the MTR. Mr Thompson explained to onlookers: 'A Chinese proverb runs: "It takes 10 years to grow a tree but you can enjoy it for eternity". We will take four years rather than 10 years, and no doubt will pull up a few trees in the process. But the mass transit railway is wholly owned by the government. It will be your railway for your use. During the first four years it will be growing for you'.
It was, somehow, a curious but characteristic co-operative contradiction between governmental enterprise and modernised communal support for mutual benefit, involving foreign investment and local labour, that seems to happen only in Hong Kong.
The Workers
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The time-worn complaints of Hong Kong 'sweated labour' and the enslavement of little children in big factories were trotted out again in England this year, and Hong Kong's London-based Commissioner, Teddy Kidd, was compelled wearily to repeat the familiar denials.
By standards of the wealthiest countries, of course, the Hong Kong worker is over-worked and under-paid. But by Asian standards, his pay and conditions are not bad and are, indeed, second only to Japan's. Workers in the garment industry are paid an average of $23 a day; the second largest group is in textiles, with an average daily wage for cotton-spinners of $21; and the largest wage-earners in the industrial daily_wage sector are the utility and dockyard groups, with an average wage of $27. Construction workers are still the highest paid at around $60-$80 a day—and now they are getting more work.
Most men employed in industry work up to nine hours a day, six days a week. Women work a 48-hour week. There are customarily six annual holidays a year. The permissible annual overtime for women and young persons (16–17 years) was reduced at the beginning of 1975 from 300 hours to a maximum of 250; from the beginning of 1976, it was further reduced to 200 Hours.
Many employers provide their workers with free accommodation, meal allow- ances, good attendance bonuses and paid rest days, as well as the Chinese New Year bonus of one month's extra pay. To repeat, these wages must be considered in terms of Asian living standards. On that basis, the average Hong Kong worker is far better off than other Asian workers, except those in Japan. Wage costs in Hong Kong industry are also helped by the operation of round-the-clock shifts, although night- work cuts back the proportion of women workers, who must keep day-time hours.
The government trains some union leaders in the methods, ideals and practice of Western unionism, but, as previously stated, there is as little local interest in these obscure alien tricks as there is in Western democratic processes.
A typical salaried, white-collar worker, who must rely on his own efforts in seeking a professional career, studies as hard in his spare time as only, it seems, an