Taikoo Dockyard & Engineering Company of Hong Kong Limited.
STAFF REPORT
W
1941
23
This has been a busy year, and the staff generally has worked well. A great deal of discontent has been caused by the evacuation of wives and families, and the passing of time seems to increase the bitterness which most of our men feel about the situation.
Many of them are becoming disgruntled, and it is affecting their enthusiasm for their work here. We may say that the extreme discontent over the evacuation is general throughout the Colony, and is not confined to this Dockyard.
From our point of view, we hope circumstances will warrant cancelling the evacuation order in the near future and putting evacuation on a purely voluntary basis. Fifteen of our first term men will complete their five year contracts next year, and one or two of them with wives in Australia have applied for four months' leave at the end of their five years.
This is not an unreasonable request, as
the men argue that if the war is still on they will only get four months' leave after six years' service.
We are sure that a number of these men, if granted leave while their wives are evacuated, will not return to our service. At the beginning of the evacuation we expressed the view that, while there was a demand for skilled labour in Australia, positions as foremen were not easily obtained, and this might deter some of our men who thought of leaving the Colony to join their families in Australia. We doubt if, after two years' absence from their wives, this would weigh with some of our younger foremen and draughtsmen. R.C. Wallace (aged 56) and D.L. Lyle (aged 59) have both applied for their wives to be allowed to return to the Colony: both applications have been turned down, with the result that they are both seriously thinking of retiring, and in view of their age we doubt if they can be restrained from doing so.
A way out in the case of these two men would be to grant them both short leave in Australia in the spring of next year. Wallace will have completed about three and a half years and Lyle four and a half years this term;
we cannot allow Lyle and Wallace to retire at the present
time.
Cancellation of the evacuation order would solve our problem, as the men would then be perfectly happy to remain in Hong Kong until it suited us to grant them leave.
The following list shows proposed dates when men could be granted leave next year, assuming that we agree to give them sixteen weeks' leave after five years' service:-