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Mary Ann

Mary Ann Benitez

Officials were yesterday accused of playing a numbers game when setting the $400 pay cut for Hong Kong's 235,000 foreign domestic helpers.

Legislator Lee Cheuk-yan, of the Confederation of Trade Unions, said every year the government was moving the goalposts and each time using a different set of economic indicators to justify its decision on setting the minimum wage for foreign domestic helpers.

'These figures serve a political purpose. They abuse the statistics,' Mr Lee told the manpower panel meeting yesterday.

Instead of taking the wage index of Hong Kong's service workers as an indicator - as was the case when the authorities cut the foreign maids' minimum wage by 5 per cent in 1999 -  Mr Lee said the government used median earnings in this year's 11 per cent pay cut, among other indicators.

As a result, service and elementary occupation workers were shown to have taken an 11 to 16 per cent pay cut when the real wage index only showed a 2 per cent reduction, Mr Lee said.

Economic Development and Labour Secretary Stephen Ip Shu-kwan said: 'We have been following the established mechanism in the past. We have been very objective and we all know that in practice, this adjustment is reasonable.'

Legislators also questioned why the government had included foreign helpers under the labour importation scheme to justify the $400 levy on their employers.

Legal sector representative Margaret Ng Ngoi-yee asked: 'We have 200,000 households which will be subject to this levy. Why is this policy not regarded as government taxation and does not have to go through the legislative process?'

Ian Wingfield, law officer at the Department of Justice, said the Supplementary Labour Scheme regulation already provided a mechanism in which the law could be applied 'prospectively' on a labour scheme, such as the importation of foreign maids.

Independent legislator Audrey Eu Yuet-me countered that the government did not impose the levy in 1995, when the idea was first floated, because it said foreign maids were not part of the labour importation scheme. 'Is the government back-tracking on the words of the previous government?' she asked.

Leung Yiu-chung, of the Neighbourhood and Workers' Service Centre, said: 'Has the policy on foreign maids undergone a policy change? It is like a bombshell being dropped on us.'



Officials accused of moving the goalposts with $400 levy