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Jake Van Der Kamp

'The construction industry has Hong Kong's highest unemployment rate of more than 12 per cent, involving some 43,500 people. The Tamar project will provide more than 2,700 employment opportunities in construction.'

Sidney Chan

Assistant director of administration

Letters to the editor

October 19

SOMEONE IN GOVERNMENT apparently thinks that to repeat a feeble rationale for a project often enough will make it a strong one. This excuse for the Tamar project remains what it is, however - feeble.

Let us get the minor points out of the way first. These 2,700 employment opportunities will be temporary ones only. All construction jobs are. When the building is finished employment becomes unemployment again.

Mr Chan may also want to ask the contractors who will get this project how much of the work will be passed on as pre-fabrication contracts to mainland sub-contractors. It is increasingly the trend. If the aim is to create jobs in Hong Kong, why not make sure the work is done in Hong Kong?

Then we get his figure of 43,500 jobless people in construction. This was the figure as of June. In the two following months alone, however, it dropped by more than 12 per cent. The figure as of August was 38,200. Construction may have the highest unemployment rate in Hong Kong but it is also the fastest declining one.

There is a reason for it. The total construction labour force has contracted by about 50,000 people since late 2002 and as the first chart indicates, it is an industry of rapidly ageing workers. Young people increasingly shun it. The only ones who stay in are older people who can no longer make a transition to something different. The number of construction workers aged over 50 consequently continues to rise.

The second chart shows you what they innately recognise. The industry's high water mark was set in 1998 and  the trend has been inexorably down since.

This may indeed not be a good thing. Most of it results from a severe contraction in new housing construction. If our economy continues robust, we may pay the price in a few years time with only a scant supply of new homes to meet a soaring demand.

But it also results from a slowly dawning awareness in officialdom that population projections made in the late 1990s have proved much too high and we have perhaps over-committed ourselves to infrastructure projects that will not be needed until many years later than we had originally thought.

A relative decline in construction activity is not unique to Hong Kong, however. The bricks and mortar stage of development is one that comes early on in economic growth and as any society becomes wealthier, the emphasis of economic effort tends to swing to other activities.

Mr Chan should keep this in mind. The fact that construction is down does not mean that our overall economy is in decline. The young people who spurn their parents' career choice of construction have probably moved into service jobs that offer them better prospects and the Hong Kong economy new avenues for growth.

There is no absolute requirement that we have a given number of construction jobs in our economy. The best way of dealing with a long-term decline in construction employment is for people to leave the industry or not join it in the first place, which is exactly what is now happening.

Government funding of construction jobs in such circumstances is only a way of cementing ourselves to our past. If the money is spent on something else, it will create just as many new jobs in other sectors. Thus, although there may be good reasons for the Tamar project, the creation of construction jobs is not one of them.

But these construction jobs will probably not be lost anyway. If a big centralised government office complex is truly needed, we will create just as many construction jobs by building it elsewhere as by building it at Tamar.

Best elsewhere then. Our world class harbour is one of the few things that allow us to call Hong Kong a world class city but there seems no stopping our political leaders from turning it into the Kowloon Ditch.

jake.vanderkamp@scmp.com



Repeatedly saying it's so won't make Tamar jobs argument stand up