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125. Labour trouble in connexion with the construction of the catchments at Shing Mun Valley investigated by the writer were found to be due to the sub- contracting system under which payment to the actual labourer was constantly in arrears and frequently deficient.
126. The chief vice in the sub-contracting system is the excessive commission drawn by the contractor, A recent petition from certain ricksha coolies in Kow- loon, who complained that the charge for which rickshas were hired to them by the day had been increased, disclosed, on investigation, the existence of certain sub- contractors who hired the rickshas at forty five to fifty cents a day each and sublet them at seventy five to eighty cents a day. This parasitic growth is being eliminated and action is being taken to control the rate at which contractors, who license their rickshas with the Police Department, hire them to the individual coolies.
127. Another questionable feature of local labour is the apprentice system which was adversely criticized by the 1921 Commission and since then has un- doubtedly decreased with the elimination of child labour in industrial undertakings. While there are genuine apprentices learning their trades as in the dockyards, the system is frequently an excuse to obtain cheap labour in return for little or no wages but with the provision of food and lodging. Several years' apprenticeship may be demanded in what would appear to be largely an unskilled trade, the secrets of which could be mastered in a month. The apprentice system is for boys what the mui-tsai system is for girls. It extends into domestic labour where a cook may require a makee-learn" to do his work for him.
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128. It may safely be said that the employment of child labour in factories in the Colony has been eradicated, although an occasional child may still be found who has wandered in to be near his mother. In 1938 there was only one prosecution for employing children under fourteen years of age.
129. The employment of children, however, even to the early hours of the morning as pages and bell boys (or girls) in local hotels persists, and children are still employed to carry the paraphernalia in Chinese funeral processions. Legislation to extend the prohibition of child labour now in force in factories (age 14), in domestic service (age 12), and at sea (age 14), to all employments would not cover the many child hawkers and newspaper sellers who throng the streets: no one could be proved to employ "' them.
One form of child labour, the carrying of building material, has practically disappeared in recent years with the extension of roads and the development of motor transport.
180. Little is known for lack of investigation concerning the conditions of outworkers, such as seamstresses and the women and girls who stitch the canvas uppers of rubber shoes.
181. Conditions in factories vary considerably from those approximating to a garden city as at the Hume Pipe Company at Tsun Wan and the Hong Kong Brewery further along the coast, where the employees are excellently housed and provided with hot and cold baths, to converted tenements in what are little better than urban siums where few or no amenities are provided for the workers.
132. One of those inspected, a tailoring establishment, was so overcrowded that one male worker engaged in ironing was found suspended from the roof on a beam with his ironing board suspended in front of him. Conditions in printing establishments and in many Chinese newspapers, most of which are concentrated in old property in the central district of Hong Kong, are generally bad.
133. Workers are adequately housed at the Hong Kong Mines, Lin Ma Hang. and lines are being erected at Needle Hill, which are described by Mr. Kershaw in his report* as "far above the standard in use in the Federated Malay States, and other places in the East." He is of the opinion that the requirements of the medical authorities in this instance are excessive. The housing of labour on temporary works at any distance from town as in the catchment works already referred to still leaves
on the subject of the control
* Report by the Senior Inspector of Mines. Perak, Federated Malay States.
measures which the Hong Kong Government should adopt in respect of local mining. No. 14 of 1938.
Sessional Paper