Stuart Wolfendale

There’s this very tired little buoy that the business class goes round and round every time the civil service gets a pay rise and they are doing it again. People like Lily Chiang of the Hong Kong General Chamber and James Tien of the Liberal Party have said that a five per cent rise spells doom.

Although the rise is supposed to be based on current pay trends in the private sector, the comparison is more complicated than the micro biological structure of Henry Tang so the business people say it’s wrong. They always do.Fearful of their employees wanting to work for more than food, they complain that civil servants who can afford two pairs of shoes each will cause envy in the private sector. They always do that too.There is the ritual concern too that any knock onto the wages of private company employees will affect Hong Kong’s competitiveness. With a median household income of $16,600  a month for 2006, how low down in the money weeds do the workers of  Asia’s World  City have to stay to compete and against who; Bangladesh, the villages of Henan or the Coconut Islands? I have friends in Bangladesh who, when they are not totally submerged, spend their time trying to rub two grains of rice together and they are not well pleased with this.Lily Chiang has also registered her view that civil servants should be paid according to performance and not length of service. This old chestnut is so hoary it’s bald and bleached. Governments do not want servants who jump up in the middle of a morning’s faithful torpor with a brilliant idea and cry out,“I have a brilliant idea! I know how we can speed up restaurant licensing procedures by doing away with DNA tests for applicants” Mr. Tsang, Mr. Hui and the mandarinate do not appreciate this and –given the mayhem that would be caused by clerks having visions of their own whilst you were in their queue- neither do you. Government leaders need loyalty, diligence, incorruptibility and the willingness to turn up in the mornings on time for years. That and not executive officers peeling off their sleeveless cardigans and working up sweats of enthusiasm is how desirable if not necessarily exciting government works.That businessmen, academics and even most professionals fail to grasp this numbingly dull truth is why they are birds loose in a room when directly transplanted into high political office. I refer you to the Anthony Leungs, the EK Yeohs and the Arthur Lis and, by having shooed them through the window, the second Tsang administration which will effectively be occupied by men suckled and brought up in Lower Albert Road. I am not inspired by that but at least I am relieved by the tedious predictability and they can keep their 5 per cent. 

 

Posted in All, Hong Kong Politics