Inside Out | Hong Kong’s moment of crisis is exposing its true challenge: chronic job insecurity

As Hong Kong is engulfed by the perfect storm of the trade war between the United States and China, self-immolating upheavals linked with the extradition idiocy, and the Covid-19 panic sweeping the world, my conviction is reinforced that the heart of Hong Kong’s long-festering challenge is not erosion of freedoms, lack of access to good housing, or even low minimum wages and gross inequality.

No, at heart, our main challenge is job insecurity. The past year has placed the livelihoods of tens of thousands of hardworking Hongkongers in chronic jeopardy. The US-China trade war threatened the future of thousands of small Hong Kong trading companies. The half year of masochistic self-harm around the extradition bill put thousands of innocent bystanders at risk.

And now the Covid-19 crisis, which is only likely to get worse worldwide in the coming months, has dealt a crushing blow to tens of thousands of jobs.

But Hong Kong’s job insecurity is not a one-year problem, just as the street riots were not conjured out of last year’s extradition bill controversy. It began in 1998 with the Asian financial crisis, crashed through the dotcom collapse and Y2K, then the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2003 and the global financial crash in 2008.

Since 1998, most Hongkongers have churned, with little dignity, through four, perhaps five, jobs. With weak social safety nets, capturing a new job often involved swallowing a lower salary. The result, 22 years later, is that for many Hong Kong families, salaries have barely changed since 1998, and confidence is poor that the job will continue to provide security.

The scale of the harm inflicted on the Hong Kong economy over the past year is still only vaguely understood, and far from quantified, but can only have aggravated this long-standing problem. Look at some of the random arithmetic. Chinese tourist arrivals that amounted to 200,000 a day in January last year have shrivelled to 3,000 a day. It is almost impossible to gauge the harm inflicted by this collapse, but it is no surprise that retail institutions such as Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group, Sa Sa International and Tsui Wah are reporting closures and massive staff cuts.