CO129-623-1 Rubber Industry- report and correspondence on the labour situation 1-4-1950 - 31-1-1951 — Page 44

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general workers and initiaties a striking maliciously high-handed

ample to expose the latter constantly under easy voluntary oppression of the employers.

With a view of inviting your sympathetic assistance, we would like to commence our story with the following facts:

In the course of its two-day investigation tour around workers' associations and clubs and some factories in Hong Kong and the opposite Kowloon, the ICFTU's Delegation made a visit to the Fung Kung Rubber shoes Factory, the biggest in this Colony, Where Mr. Dally and Mr. Krane (delegates) were shockingly aston- ished by the oral Informations from many an innocent workers that most workers there had been receiving an average daily wages from sixty cents to one dollar Hong Kong (the lowest only 30 cents), the equivalent of the price of one pack of cigarettes, or two or one apple, in exchange for 12-hour work aday in a horribly sharp contrast to the report from Mr. Charlie Chang, speaking for the employer, that the average wages of that factory was three dollars H.K. as remuneration for daily 8-hour work with half-hour time for rest.

This contradicting and incongruous reports from both the employer and the workers to the 【CFTU's Delegation immediately showed its ill effects the very next day, 24th July, when the employer of that factory, deadly chagrined at the exposure of the factory's unjust and inhuman treatments to the workers and the frankness on the part of the workers in answering questions of the ICFTU's delegates, suddenly announced the discharge of more than one hundred workers in order to replace them with other more obedient and underpaid new workers,

Subsequently this attempt foundered before the strong opposition and protest of the workers. However, this only heralded the arrival of a bigger disaster, as the employer, being originally desperately averse to the workers' legal organisation inside his factory, was concocting a more complete "purge" among his workers who although had been working hard,,with the lowest wages in Hong- Kong, for more than ten or twenty years.

Like a shattering thunderbolt ripping up the quietness of a peaceful night, a notice of unconditional discharge. for all the workers in the factory was published all of a sudden at 11:30 P.M. 8th August, 1950, just two weeks after the visit of the ICFTU's Delegation. The shock loomed like a mid-night terror with- out the least sign of warning, to say nothing of advance notice, threatening the subsistence of the upwards of one thousand and seven hundred workers (female and male) who were narrowly cking out their living with meager wages,

To perfect this maniacally inhuman and irrational op- pression, policemen were seriously and securely posted in the factory the next morning to prevent the entry of any worker. Those working on day shift and being ignorant of the discharge notice the night before were even more stunned.

Although the officially established agreement between employer and workers was as authentio as have been formally writ- ten and published, and the Colonial Emergency Regulations were stringently in force, both documents planting employers and workers on an equal and reciprocal basis in that any calculated and sudden closure of factory on the part of an employer is just as illegal

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