TNAG-0087-FCO40-123-Conditions-of-employment-for-Hong-Kong-Chinese-working-in-th-1969 — Page 63

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come to a job and someone has to guarantee his repatriation before the Home Office will let him in. It is immaterial to the Home Office who pays the journey to this country, so long as the repatriation is guaranteed.

22.

The Hong Kong Labour Department co-operates with the U.K. Ministry of Labour. It forwards to the Ministry of Labour applications from both aliens and Commonwealth citizens wishing to come to the U.K. for employment. When permits (for aliens) or vouchers (for Commonwealth citizens) are issued by Britain, the Department of Labour delivers them to the workers concerned. Incidentally, this enables the Department of Labour to produce very precise statistics on this whole subject see table attached.

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23. It has always been considered in Hong Kong that labour conditions and legislation in Britain could be relied on to ensure that people coming to this country to work did not need special protection and, although strict control was maintained over the contracts of all going from Hong Kong to work elsewhere in the world (and the number and widely scattered nature of the countries to which they go is astounding Norway, Brunei, Ghana, the Bahamas, the Solomon Islands, Western Germany are only a few), this was not necessary in the case of Britain. Informally, however, contracts were examined and advice given. I understand this is still done in the case of those going to Britain under the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, even though the law concerning contracts for overseas employment does not apply to them. Legislation dating from the end of the 19th century existed in Hong Kong to protect people going overseas to work largely because of abuses, kidnapping, blackbirding etc. which existed in the past.

24. In recent years the I.L.O. came into the picture. For some time they had been concerned by the fact that, how ever well Hong Kong did in fact watch over the interests of people going overseas for employment, the legislation (i.e. the ancient laws referred to) did not cover all migrant workers and was far from implementing the Convention on the subject (No.64) which Britain had ratified and had undertaken to apply to "indigenous workers" in mon-metropolitan countries.

25.

Hong Kong therefore overhauled their legislation on the subject (a very troublesome business) and enacted the Contracts for Overseas Employment Ordinance 1965. They excluded from the application of this Ordinance all people coming under the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1961. They felt that they could not exclude the aliens, because of the necessity to provide for repatriation.

26. For use with the law Hong Kong drew up a model contract not a statutory document but one which did cover all the things the statute required, and put in a few more desirable things. It is a perfectly reasonable document, as a "model", but it did not fit all the circumstances of, say, countries in Europe. For example, there was a clause in it about compensation for injuries at work which was inapropriate in countries like the U.K. and most of Europe where social insurance schemes already covered this subject:

this we got them to amend. There are other clauses which implied that some authority in Britain was to act as the "authority" to which workers could turn if in difficulty over their contract, but these clauses concerned matters which were

competence not within the confidence of our Ministry of Labour and some at least of them should not have been included in any contract for employment in Britain.

The fact that this model was used without adaptations has caused annoyance and confusion to the U.K. Ministry of Labour and to some of the Hong Kong workers who thought that they had not had a square deal: one of these clauses is now omitted from contracts to the U.K. Apart from those clauses required by the Hong Kong law itself, others were put into the model contract to help workers employed far from home and in countries in Asia and/Pacific the local

the Ministries of Labour were accustomed to dealing with such matters and took on the responsibility without difficulty. In Britain, of course, a worker in dispute with an employer would normally turn to his trade union for help, but foreign workers tend not to join trade unions/not to be particularly welcomed when they do, so they are rather left without help unless there is someone specifically deputed to look after their problems, e.g. a liaison officer from

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