Various communities in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
(HKSAR) expressed their support Monday for the HKSAR government's
attempt to table a draft bill on implementing a civil service pay
cut Wednesday.
Some academics, such as Joseph Cheng Yu Shek, a politics professor
of the City University of Hong
Kong, said the civil service in Hong Kong has lacked reform for
several decades.
"In the early 1970s, Hong Kong's civil service system was similar
to those in the United Kingdom and Singapore. However, in the past
30 years, the systems in these countries have been dramatically
reformed, while Hong Kong's has remained stagnant."
In
its front-page editorial, the Hong Kong Economic Journal has
also lent support Monday to the HKSAR government's plan of
legislating.
It
said by drafting law, the HKSAR government is only hoping to obtain
the same power the private sector has in controlling the employees'
pay and thus in narrowing the discrepancies in the economic status
between the private and public sectors by cutting the civil
servants' salaries by 1.58 percent to 4.42 percent.
It
stressed that the measure will not take away any other benefits
from the civil servants, adding that so far, no one has come up
with a better way than legislating.
"From the current row, we believe there should be a review on the
ways in which government contracts are signed in future.... How
come the civil servants have had the salary hikes closely indexed
with those in the private sector, and not have had their cuts
indexed?" the editorial questioned the protesters who took to the
street Sunday.
The view of the editorial was echoed by a passerby on the street,
who reportedly expressed anger over civil servants in protest of
the government's legislating on a small pay cut, saying that such
behavior was not acceptable.
"Every one is getting pay cuts, why not the civil servants?" the
South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported Monday.
The SCMP also ran an editorial entitled "The greater good" Monday,
commenting that the thousands of civil servants taking to the
street "have failed to endear themselves to the most members of the
public."
"The fact is that the pay-cut levels, at between 1.58 percent and
4.42 percent, are modest and have been determined through a
well-accepted mechanism," the editorial said.
"Even after their salaries are slashed, civil servants will still
be overpaid compared with their private sector counterparts, " it
said.
The editorial said a law has to be passed to implement the
reduction only because the clauses governing pay adjustment in
their appointment contracts are murky."
Yet, for the greater good of Hong Kong, "the pay cut must be
implemented and civil service reform has to continue," the SCMP
said.
With widespread support for the HKSAR government continuous civil
service reform, Lau Siu Kai, the head of the Central Policy Unit of
the HKSAR government reassured the public that the government will
not decrease the pace of the reform due to "the heavy price" the
government is paying.
(Xinhua News
Agency July 9, 2002)