(4)
discretion. Common official agreement and Labour Regulations are just as good as non-existent.
(4) Two weeks had hardly elapsed when the workers of Wah Hing Button Factory were confronted with a minatory notice from their employer. It conveyed the employer's order to reduce unconditionally the wages and was openly and boldly worded that his factory would follow the example of the measure of complete discharge adopted first by the Fung Kung Rubber shoe Factory, should his workers say "No" to it.
With their celebrated example of complete discharge adopted first by Fung Kung Rubber Shoes Factory, the manner of most of the general employers is growing arrogantly immovable in their dealings with our workers; the low-margin subsistence of our workers in this Colony is totally placed under the menace of unexpected and ubi- quitous massive enemployment, and worst of all, Communist agitation is rampantly canvassing for chance of infiltration.
(The disastrous effects would have been easily imagined by
would any observer that what fate else except hunger and destitude, have befallen those poor rubber shoes workers whose daily bitter existence hangs only on a meager wages, viz. an average daily pay- ment of 60 cents (some 30 cents) to H.K.pl.00 that only enables the common citizen to buy three or two apples or one pack of cigarettes, as was authentically discovered by Mr. Krane and Mr. Dally, the ICFTU's Delegation to Hong Kong. In the course of this period of about a month, life for them has been more and more fraught w. th obdepa sessing worries and bitter sufferings; hunger has virtually become part of their daily life. It is impossible for them to cope with the exigences of even a scanty life with just a place to sleep and some clothes to don. No one would have expected some savings of them whose livelihood was scarcely carried on with little wages. Starvation and the tragedy of human life are imminent on these one thousand and seven hundred workers.
What this TUC, being constantly badly in lack of operative fund, can do is only to mobilize all the workers' associations to tender material and moral support to these discharged workers to render them tenable, not against the oppression of the employer as the latter has already achieved the triumph with impunity, but against the fatal attack of starvation.
But what shall this TUC and the general workers do when presently this unfavourable tendency is allowed to prevail with other erployers likely to discharge uurestrainedly more and more workers, we dare not visualize how heavy the burden will be on the shoulders of those still in employment but with scanty wages to support the livelihood of those discharged workers still increasing in number.
(b) Naturally, the privation of our liberty-loving and law abiding bona fide workers is the enjoyment of our enemies, the Communist agents, whose propaganda is desperately depreciating and
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.