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cheap labour was so vast during those years that official government statistics show that an unskilled labourer could be hired for a daily wage of 3/9d (19p) dur- ing the whole period 1948-62. Throughout these years too the new commercial and industrial elite began to move into the organs of government.

It is possible to view the 1950s as the period of "take off" when the provision of jobs was more important than any- thing else. The 1960s, however, were un- equivocally a period of intense exploita- tion. Economic and political power united to ensure that capital grew fat at the ex- pense of labour. Studies of the distribu- tion of income show that labour's share of value added in manufacturing actually declined in a period of rapid growth; and that this was not due to an intensi- fication of capital investment but to a much greater return on capital. One eco- nomist has calculated that labour's share fell from around 64 per cent in 1960 to between 44 and 47 per cent in 1967 (N. C. Owen in Hopkins, op cit). Glassburner and Riedel do not agree that it fell so repidly but agree that it fell (Economic Record, volume 48, March 1972).

At the same time various surveys showed that even by Asian standards Hong Kong employees spent appallingly long hours at work. A survey of Resettlement estate dwellers carried out by the Sociology De- partment of the University of Hong Kong in the summer of 1968 revealed that the average income of the heads of house- holds was HK$332 (about £22) per month. 87 per cent worked all Saturdays and 73 per cent worked all Sundays. Only 12 per cent worked eight hours or less per day and 42 per cent worked eleven hours or more each day. When travel to work was taken into account, the predominant picture was that the head of the house- hold was absent from home twelve hours a day, seven days a week. This picture is supplemented by research conducted by Dr R. Mitchell. This shows that in 1968 Hong Kong workers had the longest working day and the longest working week of city dwellers in South East Asia. 52 per cent worked ten hours a day or more compared with 20 per cent of Singa-

pore's workers, and 58 per cent in Hong Kong worked seven days a week com- pared with 21 per cent in Singapore. Mitchell's findings are supported by a survey of workers in 182 shops in Nathan Road in Kowloon which was carried out in 1969. Half of these shopworkers worked twelve or more hours a day and only 8 per cent worked for nine hours or less. Over 80 per cent worked seven days a week and less than a fifth had more than two days' holiday a month. It ap- peared that the majority of shopworkers spent practically all their waking hours at work. (Further details and references in England and Rear, op cit.)

At the same time government protection for those at work was deplorable. Apart from an extremely inadequate system of workmen's compensation for injury, first introduced in 1953, such legislation as there was applied only to the industrial sector, and then excluded certain grades of workers. Consequently, over 60 per cent of the labour force was totally un- protected by restrictions on hours of work, holidays, rest periods or sickness allowances. The protection afforded to industrial workers was indeed minimal.

There was no minimum wage and no limit on working hours for men, but women and young persons were restricted to sixty hours a week. The entitlement to sick pay amounted to twelve half days a year. Industrial safety regulations were primitive. Among further innumerable omissions it might be noted that there was no protection in law for wages, no provision for maternity leave, no re- dundancy pay, and almost no job pro- tection.

At the same time expenditure on social welfare, both directly and via subventions to voluntary organisations, accounted for only 1 per cent of total government ex- penditure, less than the annual expendi- ture on stores and less than one third the sum spent annually on the two universi- ties (Owen, op cit). An extremely limited form of public assistance provided "dry rations" for the destitute. Yet these were the years when there were vast budget surpluses, most of which were remitted to