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receive increments he does not suffer by the change,
but when he reaches his maximum he does, and when he
retires he loses the one-sixth addition to
pensionable emoluments.
To make up for the former,
the maxima of the new Class I and Special Class would
have to be raised to $2,840 and $5,900 respectively, at
any rate for men already in the Service now; to make up for
the latter they would have to be raised to $3,033 and
$6,533. It would follow that the minimum of the Special
Class should be raised correspondingly.
The Governor asks that he should be left to
announce his solution of the problems raised by the
petitioners, and that the latter could then petition the
Secretary of State again if they were not satisfied.
It seems to me, however, that this is hardly the best
way of setting about the matter, since it means that the
Hong Kong Government must first commit itself ex parte
to the Secretary of State the onus of upsetting and then transfer/its decision in regard to any matter
on which the Junior Clerical Service can raise a
reasonable objection.
If there were some Association representing
that Service, I suppose this petiton would have come
from them, instead of from a number of individuals,
but I should have thought it was nevertheless possible
to ask the petitioners to nominate representatives to
discuss their complaints with the Government before
the latter came out with a cut-and-dried plan.
I should be inclined to suggest this course
of action in reply to (1), saying that it has occurred
to us that a number of objections, such as those set out
above, might reasonably be raised to the scheme proposed,
though it is appreciated that some of those objections
only apply to parts of that scheme which are only
provisional