It’s easy to forget that Hong Kong’s Democratic Party still exists. Former Chair Wu Chi-wai is among the HK 47, in jail awaiting sentencing for participating in the pan-dems’ 2020 primary election. The party is in effect barred from what remains of elections in the all-patriots era. And its remaining members mostly keep their heads down. But they are joining in the annual Chief Executive’s Policy Address suggestions ritual (even though they are not invited to the stage-managed town hall consultation meetings).
It’s also easy to forget that there was once a serious survey to compare public-sector and private-sector pay. It was roughly 25 years ago (was it done by Price Waterhouse?). It found that government employees’ remuneration was more than double that in the real world, and officials hastily buried it. Today, civil service pay adjustments are usually, roughly, based on private-sector pay rises – ignoring the gap in base pay levels.
The DP tentatively alludes to this in its Policy Address recommendations, and raises the equally pressing issues of the sheer size of the civil service and the poor state of government finances…
It proposed that the government cease civil service expansion in the face of economic woes. Hong Kong logged an estimated HK$139 billion deficit in 2022-23 and HK$101 billion in 2023-24.
“When the economy is bad and residents are feeling the pressures, does it look good if the government continues to expand its civil service?” Democratic Party Chairperson Lo Kin-hei said in Cantonese during a press conference on Sunday. “I think the government should stop hiring and review the various pay grades, to see if there are positions that could be cut.”
He also suggested that principal government officials cut their salaries in the spirit of experiencing the difficult times alongside residents, according to local media reports.
The small number of people picked to attend Policy Address forums suggested things like ‘recruiting volunteers to help tourists take photos on the waterfront and creating a new mascot for the city’, plus no doubt things about baby panda bears. The DP urges the government to safeguard human rights, rule of law and the free flow of information, provide better treatment for inmates and sexual minorities, and introduce universal suffrage…
[Chairperson Lo Kin-hei] said his party had hoped to meet with Chief Secretary Eric Chan last week, but to no avail.
They are so irrelevant in the new HK. When will they disband? Maybe after all of their candidates fail to stand for election in the next Legco vote?
It’s not just Wu Chi-wai who bears the Democratic Party standard among the persecuted 47 – there’s Lam Cheuk Ting, Ricky Or, Andrew Wan and Helena Wong. And Au Nok-hin, Andrew Chiu, Gary Fan and Ben Chung all cut their teeth with the mother party. Ted Hui is out of reach, but not out of mind, and Roy Kwong and James To are among the original arrestees, who are still ‘pending’, without passports or certainty where their life is headed.
Those are big shoes to fill for Lo Kin-hei and co, and the party’s relative quietness only serves to highlight the continuing bravery of the League of Social Democrats et al, still pounding out a democratic beat.
Any Chinese called Eric is a nerd.
Just my experience.
The pay studies were conducted by the actuarial consulting firm, Watson Wyatt (now Willis Towers Watson). The firm acted as reliable government toadies for many years, notoriously fronting for the fund management industry in the government-sponsored MPF debacle that was rightly opposed at the time by the majority of working people, but even they couldn’t manufacturer enough lipstick to cover up the pig of overpaid public sector employees vs. private sector wage slaves.
An index linked civil service pension is the jackpot for anybody in Hong Kong. And let’s not forget the perks, not least the ability for civil servants to queue-jump at public hospitals.
These civil servants are good for nothing oxygen thieves.
My experience with public-facing civil servants across several departments (Companies Registry, Hospital Authority, IRD, Transport Department, Post Office, Immigration, Labour Department, probably others), has been uniformly positive. They are knowledgeable, polite and efficient within the confines of their bureaucratic roles. The sinews of the old colonial administration run deep.
On the other hand, departmental leadership seems highly politicised and generally ineffective, or worse.