Hong Kong, so advanced in many things, has been sailing blissfully back to the past as members of the ruling elite make a last-ditch attempt to thwart, or at least severely undermine, the establishment of a minimum wage. If the fine, upstanding citizens opposing the introduction of a minimum wage would care to lift their eyes above their navels, they would discover that regulation of this kind exists in practically all the world's most successful economies and that it is understood to be a responsibility of the state to ensure that raw exploitation is not part of the system.
The truly ugly face of the elite was displayed by Tommy Cheung Yu-yan, supposedly the representative of the catering sector in the legislature, who proposed a starvation wage of HK$20 per hour. As an employer in this sector, I can say without reservation that Cheung does not represent my views nor, I dare say, the majority in the catering trade who are employees but, who, of course, are denied a vote in the rotten borough system that operates among the functional constituencies.
Cheung, who has since backtracked, was however merely foolish enough to say in public what many of the primitive thinkers among Hong Kong's ruling class really believe. They have spent decades resisting the establishment of a minimum wage for the understandable reason that it raises the costs of doing business and for the less acceptable reason that they fundamentally see themselves and their business as being above intervention by society.
However, we in the catering trade are already subject to a degree of regulation unknown in other sectors. Our premises are licensed by a giant bureaucracy with a remit to protect the interests of health and hygiene, which sounds good, but in reality has imposed a spider's web of nonsensical regulations that undermine the noble ends they are supposed to achieve.
Yet, while the industry has reluctantly learned to live with these bureaucrats, some draw the line at meddling with the cost of labour. Other industries would also be affected by the introduction of a minimum wage and see it as the thin end of the wedge.
In so doing, they are questioning the unwritten and barely mentioned social contract which keeps Hong Kong society afloat. To those living outside Hong Kong, especially among free-market ideologues, this contract is hard to understand - that a free-enterprise society can provide public housing for half its citizens, along with a level of public health care and education that, if you listen to current debates in the US, equates to the imposition of full-blooded communism.