Give us a break: Hong Kong needs to limit working hours if it's serious about making people's lives better
Alice Wu says since other economies have benefited from regulating working hours, there's no reason why we can't too, despite alarmist warnings about the adverse economic effects
Robert Owen, the man who coined the slogan "Eight hours' labour, eight hours' recreation, eight hours' rest", demanded a 10-hour workday more than 200 years ago. By 1817, he was demanding eight-hour days. Maybe we shouldn't be so shocked to hear that Sweden has recently adopted the six-hour workday.
A persistently overworked and underpaid workforce will be affecting long-term economic development in every aspect, and we don't need economists to tell us that
It may be true that Sweden is a very different place from, say, Hong Kong, where a quarter of the workforce put in, per week, an average of 51 hours or more, according to the Standard Working Hours Committee. It is also true that this is not the 1800s.
Coming back to modern times, let's not forget that our neighbours - Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan, among others - have already adopted an eight-hour working day while we drag our feet.
The latest committee report threw up some scaremongering numbers crunched by government economists. They include projections of more than 34,000 jobs lost among those who earn HK$15,000 or less a month, a 2 percentage-point increase in inflation, and up to 7,000 now-profit-making companies going into the red if we adopt a 44-hour working week.
Perhaps the most damning words were: "If manpower shortage turns even more acute, Hong Kong's longer-term economic development would be inadvertently affected."
Telling people who are barely making enough, working night and day, that they may be looking at unemployment is scary. Telling businesses that they may not make a profit is scary. Runaway inflation is scary for everyone and maybe that's why number-crunchers always throw that threat in our faces.
It's the same song and dance, really, every time the minimum wage issue comes up. And yet, they have admitted there was no telling how the implementation of a minimum wage drove up inflation. The truth is, food and rent are far greater inflation drivers. So for a really good scare, they threaten our long-term economic development.