6
Employment
From 1 May, the Minimum Wage Ordinance was amended to increase the statutory minimum wage rate by 8.3 per cent to $32.50 per hour.
The department carried out 4,506 prosecutions for breaches of various ordinances and regulations in 2015, resulting in fines totalling more than $28.26 million.
International Labour Affairs
Hong Kong applies 41 international labour conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). These conventions set standards that have a significant bearing on the formulation of the city's labour laws.
Hong Kong continued to take part actively in ILO activities in 2015, keeping itself abreast of international labour issues. In June, a team comprising representatives of employers, employees and the government attended the 104th Session of the International Labour Conference as part of the People's Republic of China delegation.
Labour Advisory Board
The Labour Advisory Board, a representative tripartite consultative body, advises the Commissioner for Labour on labour matters and ILO conventions and recommendations. It is chaired by the commissioner and comprises 12 members, with six representing employers and six representing employees.
In 2015, five committees of the board dealt separately with employees' compensation, employment services, occupational safety and health, labour relations and implementation of international labour standards. A working group under the board dealt with applications for labour importation under a Supplementary Labour Scheme.
Employment Services
The department provides a wide range of free employment and recruitment services to job- seekers and employers through 13 job centres, two recruitment centres for the catering and retail industries, a Telephone Employment Service Centre and a Job Vacancy Processing Centre. Round-the-clock employment services are available through an Interactive Employment Service website, which recorded around 250 million page views in 2015, or an average of 680,000 per day. The department also organises large-scale, district-based and thematic job fairs. For major closure or retrenchment cases, the department will set up a telephone hotline and special counters at job centres to provide priority job referral services for affected workers.
In 2015, the department registered 67,221 job-seekers and made about 148,300 job placements. It recorded 1,343,035 private-sector vacancies, an increase of 10 per cent compared with 2014.
Employment Programme for the Middle-aged
This programme provides employers, who engage eligible people aged 40 or above and give them on-the-job training, with a maximum training allowance of $3,000 per month per employee for three to six months. In 2015, 2,541 middle-aged job-seekers were employed
109