Tour guide wage dispute set to continue as court option dropped
Further disputes over the way tour guides' wages are calculated look likely after the guides decided against continuing their court battle with travel agencies because they fear more delays to a new wage structure.
About 50 people, including former and current Hong Thai Travel Services tour guides, protested outside the agency's Admiralty headquarters during a half-day strike yesterday. They said Hong Thai had refused to discuss the inclusion of tips when calculating claims for holiday pay.
'We are not going to proceed with our case to the Labour Tribunal as planned,' Dicky Tong Kim-sang, chairman of the Hong Kong Travel Industry (Outbound) Tour Escort and Tour Guide Union, said. 'We do not have so much money and time.'
Last month, the city's highest court blocked an appeal by Wing On Travel and held that tips paid to tour guides should be counted as part of their wages following a Court of Appeal's ruling in May last year.
The case can be traced back to 2004 when 15 tour guides went to the Labour Tribunal. The workers had been scheduled to return to the tribunal on March 2 to learn details of the new compensation package.
'We believe there will be appeals after the ruling again. We do not want to wait another five years,' Mr Tong said, adding that the union was now demanding that the various travel companies discuss compensation with it directly. The union said Hong Thai was refusing to answer its claim. 'It just wants to see the case drag on forever,' Mr Tong said.
Hong Thai Travel Service general manager Susanna Lau Mei-sze said every travel company was waiting for the Labour Tribunal's ruling as a reference for wage calculations. Hong Thai employs about 500 tour guides.
'As they have just announced that they will not go to the court, we really have no idea how to calculate the wage now,' she said.
The union is also demanding that tips should be included when companies calculate wages for rest days (one day off a week), and not only statutory holidays and public holidays (about 19 days a year).
'It is ridiculous if companies pay us the rest day salary simply by calculating our basic salary, which is only about HK$1,800 to HK$2,000 a month. Tips make up about 90 per cent of our salary,' Spencer Leung, a tour guide who worked for Hong Thai for 12 years, said.
Hong Thai said the demand was unreasonable. 'According to employment ordinances, rest days are not included as paid days,' Ms Lau said.
The Labour Department said that whether rest days should be counted as paid or non-paid days was subject to the agreement between workers and employers.
'We are now closely monitoring the situation and will offer assistance if there is the need,' a spokesman said.
