Stuart Wolfendale

A friend of mine who is in the business shook his head at the start of the construction workers’ strike. Why are they bothering picketing a building site in the back of beyond which nobody cares about? That won’t  scare the contractors. It was as though they had heard him somehow.

On Saturday afternoon I stepped outside my club to see that a policeman had propped his bike up in the middle of the road and blocked off Ice House Street. He was running down it in a tizzy calling to caretakers to direct cars from their buildings the wrong way up the one way street. Nothing was to go into Central.

From Queen’s Road I heard keen roars and bull horns but not yet the crack and crunch of breaking plate glass. The steel-benders had come to town.

Either somebody had had a word with them or they had worked it out all by themselves but 500 of them had marched into Kowloon, got on the Star Ferry (and there, tradition lives on) and tramped up to the Central Government offices to put their case. Taking your grievances to the Government on Saturday is a bit like trying to return a flawed sweater to Marks and Spencer at three o’clock in the morning. There’s nobody there lads.

Secretary for Labour, Matthew Cheung is supposed to have declined to see them though whether the minimum wage gatekeepers in baseball caps at Lower Albert Road actually put through a call to whatever golf club, shopping mall or sailing dingy Cheung was in is questionable. So, the workers spilled back down Battery Path and not a little frustrated and perhaps puzzled what to do next with their outing, came to a halt in the middle of Queen’s Road Central where they stood, sat or lay down.

Central was drained of cars and stopped for two hours. By extension, surrounding neighbourhoods were blocked. People walked down the middle of the streets.

I stood at the edge of the crowd amongst a group of beefy, tanned men who were talking in a timbre of Cantonese and at a volume that one does not normally get the pleasure of listening to in Central. Putting it in a way that demands further definition but which you wont get from me, they simply were not meant to be in that district shooting the breeze on a Saturday afternoon.

By accident more than design, these rough hewn fellows had discovered a powerful and reusable weapon in their fight. They had swiftly planted themselves at the arterial heart of the bourgeois and business capital and it was having a mild coronary. The media are having a carnival.

It is not something the steel benders should see to do every weekend but, given the way their case continues to be handled, I am sure they will be back. Two self serving unions are fighting to be their champions and the Government arbitrators think that the art of bargaining is always to split the difference, so now we have a solution in which they would work eight and a quarter hours a day.

Nobody likes to be intimidated by use of the quarter hour. Much more of that nonsense and the Landmark Mandarin will be shuttering its windows against brawny blokes from the sites demanding warm San Mig by the bottle

Posted in All, Hong Kong Politics, law and order