My Take | It's time to stop exploiting Hong Kong's street cleaners

I often feel awed and remorseful about how clean most of our city's streets are given the blatant and callous exploitation of street cleaners under the government's system of outsourcing cleaning services to private contractors.

A Post report this week highlights how the city's 9,700 hard-working but poorly paid street sweepers have limited job benefits, primarily because the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department hands out contracts for two years to private companies. So the cleaners never accrue Mandatory Provident Fund rights and sick and pay leave beyond the period of the contract.

Our reporter wrote that "the department declined to explain why the street sweeping contracts were outsourced, saying only that the policy was designed to ensure the best use of public money". Well, let me explain it, now that Tung Chee-hwa, our first chief executive, is back in the limelight. He is the main culprit, though his then financial secretary Donald Tsang Yam-kuen and others also helped formulate and implement this system of exploitation.

In 1998, in response to the Asian financial crisis, the Tung administration started to shrink the civil service payroll. But the real reason is the belief or ideology that the government should work like a corporation. The government started contracting out jobs instead of keeping cleaners as government workers. Overnight, they became private contract workers, and their wages and benefits quickly went into free fall. Abuse and breaches of labour laws were widespread among contractors. This was clearly a breach of Article 100 of the Basic Law, which guarantees the same wages, benefits and conditions for government workers after the handover as before. But a judge ruled that it was OK and no one bothered to appeal.

For the next decade, the cleaners' wages trended ever downwards. Our second chief executive promised a minimum wage law in 2005 but that didn't happen until 2011. The lowered wages instead accrued to the bottom line of contractors and subcontractors, who, to be fair, operate with razor-thin margins and frequently face closure.

I am a socialist on this one: the government should end this disgraceful outsourcing and hire back the street cleaners.