Hong Kong's Civil Servants Reject Pay Cut Calls
The Hong Kong Standard reported on Wednesday that the SAR's civil servants
are standing firm in the face of pay cut threats, arguing that as they are not
the cause of the government's massive budget deficit, they should not be made
to suffer in order to ease it. Speaking on Tuesday, Executive Councillor, James Tien announced plans to lobby
the civil service unions for further salary reductions of between 6% and 7%.
However, following so close on the heels of the 1.58% to 4.42% cut implemented
this month, Mr Tien's request has put the government employees in a defiant
mood. 'Another paycut? No way,' Leung Chau-ting, the Chairman of the Federation of
Civil Service Unions responded. 'The huge deficit is not caused by us, and it's
unreasonable to ask staff to bear the brunt. One may argue it is failed governance
that caused the deficit problem.' An - unsurprisingly unpopular - alternative or supplementary cost-cutting measure
could be to reduce the number of civil servants employed by the jurisdiction's
authorities. Speaking to the HK Standard yesterday, Felix Cheung, chairman of the Hong Kong
Civil Servants General Union, admitted that: 'Reducing the size [of the civil service workforce] is lawful. We can't raise
any objection to that. But the government needs to be careful about how much
services would be affected so that the public won't blame the civil servants
for failing to deliver.' .
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