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How Hong Kong courts and bureaucrats left elderly street cleaners out in the cold
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The 2003 outsourcing of around 10,000 of the poorest civil servants into privatised slavery and poverty was about the most indescribably shameful, uncaring and unjust act imaginable (“Don’t treat us like trash”, September 8).
But for that monstrous bureaucratic crime, most of the cleaners, now aged over 60, would be enjoying deserved retirement on the modest civil service pensions they were guaranteed under the Joint Declaration and Article 102 of the Basic Law. The government should immediately restore those pension rights to them, plus other just retrospective compensation.
Although, contrary to Article 100 of the Basic Law, senior judges ruled it was constitutional to impose pay cuts – and implicitly outsourcing – on civil servants whose service continued through 1997, those rulings were tragically wrong. The fault lies with the bureaucracy and, even more disappointingly, the judiciary.
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After Hong Kong’s extremely neoliberal post-1997 government cut civil service pay in 2003 and the matter went to court, the Court of Appeal ruled that the pay cuts violated Article 100, but this ruling was overturned by the Court of Final Appeal in 2005.
It's time to stop exploiting Hong Kong's street cleaners
Challenge outsourcing constitutionally to defend cleaners’ rights
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