GET OUT of my seat, you others. I am back from leave and itching to get in some target practice.
It was Thursday's issue of this newspaper that Air Canada offered me on the return flight and there on the front page was financial secretary Antony Leung Kam-chung proclaiming that companies are likely to continue slashing jobs and had spent too much money increasing 'productivity' in recent years.
Yes, a target made to order. When a government official does not bother looking at the statistics that his own civil service collects at considerable expense and trouble before pronouncing on what those statistics show then a little target practice is in order.
What those statistics show is that the corporate sector is not slashing jobs at all. Some companies may be doing so but other companies adding to their payrolls more than make up for this loss. In fact, as the chart shows, over the past two years employment in Hong Kong has risen by more than 150,000 new jobs. That is a net increase, net of jobs lost.
This seems strange, you say. Our unemployment rate is rising again. How can you have the number of people unemployed rising while the number of people employed is also rising?
There is a simple answer. To achieve this miracle all you need do is open the borders wide to migrant labour in response to employers' lobbies that want to keep wages down. That is the way we have long been doing it and nothing much has changed, not least that financial secretaries do not look at the figures before making remarks about unemployment.
And now to this matter of companies putting too much money into 'productivity'. I cannot refute it with figures. There are no worthwhile ones on productivity in the SAR except in the now tiny manufacturing sector and those figures are well out of date.
