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Jake Van Der Kamp

'Now that the government is introducing a five-day week, will those in business who do not follow suit be considered heartless employers?'

James Tien Pei-chun,

Liberal Party chairman

GOOD QUESTION, MR TIEN. Workers in the private sector will undoubtedly make the contrast with their public sector counterparts who get the full weekend off.

But I have seen heartless employers at work and a Saturday morning shift was the least of the miseries they would unthinkingly inflict.

Some years ago, before Hong Kong's new regulatory world came into full being, I was a junior at a small stock brokerage where the chief dealer had a definite eye out for his own interests.

He was meant to do his job by transacting all the buy and sell orders that came across his desk as quickly as possible and then immediately sending the completed dealing slips to the back office for processing.

He had a better way of making money, however. He did indeed transact those deals during market hours but then left all the slips to pile up on his desk. In the late afternoon, after he had seen how the market moved during the day and had a feel for how prices were going in London, he would play a game of this-for-me-and-that-for-you with those slips and only then send them to the back office.

It was against the rules, of course, even then, but it certainly was a sure-fire way for him and his friends to make money and, even now, with a requirement that all buy and sell orders be time-stamped as they are received, there are ways to play the game.

Those time-stamping machines need occasional maintenance and resetting, you see, which requires opening them with a key. There are plenty of key copying stalls on the street. Figure it out.

But it all meant that our poor back office staff could only really start the processing work at about 4.30 pm and then they frequently had to stay in until midnight.

Did our chief dealer then tell them that they could also start work late or stagger the shift with the biggest contingent coming in only in the afternoon?

Oh no, for that might have given the game away. They all had to troop in bright and early, twiddle their thumbs for hours on end and hope the buses were still running when they finished late at night. Those employees actually valued their Saturday morning shift. The market was closed and it gave them time at their desks to catch up on their sleep.

This is only one small story of a heartless employer and I cannot claim that I have direct knowledge of many of them. Employers in the financial trade tend on the whole to treat their employees more tenderly than is done in other businesses.

But I have heard plenty of harrowing stories of workers never given a moment's rest, forced to work right through weekends and short-changed on their pay. You have heard them too, I'm sure.

You will find no evidence of it in the official statistics on the length of the working day, however. They say that median hours of work in all industries have never exceeded 48 hours per week over the past 10  years. No, I lie. For workers in wholesale, retail, restaurants and hotels it was 50 hours on two brief occasions,  say the figures. Uh-huh.

I cannot see that the government's adoption of a five-day week will significantly affect Hong Kong's competitiveness if adopted by the private sector. In no office in which I was ever employed did I ever see much productive work done on a Saturday. I shall grant you that it may not be so in construction, but mostly, it's true.

In fact, our general competitiveness may even be enhanced if overly long working hours are shortened and so many people are not sodden with weariness when asked to carry out tasks that require a little thought.

But I am, of course, speaking here of people to whom a 48-hour work is only a distant hope, who are never paid overtime, who are regularly expected to work right through weekends, leave alone just Saturdays, and to whom a five-day week would only mean that they are forced to do at home what they would otherwise do in the office in order that the boss can keep up formal appearances.

No, Mr Tien, the problem of heartless employers goes a lot deeper than just requiring staff to  work on Saturdays. If this were the only count against so many offenders, there would not be much ground to call them heartless.

And I do not think Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen has gone very far at all with his five-day government work week to relieving the miseries of those most oppressed.



Even a six-day week just a pipe dream for our oppressed workers