On July 7 over 35,000 public sector workers from different union federations, including HKCTU, held a protest march against the government's aggressive unilateral moves to impose pay cuts and demanded the right to collective bargaining.

Not only did the government refuse to negotiate with civil servants' unions over the proposed pay cuts, it even moved to enforce the pay cuts by law. (The Public Officers Pay Adjustment Bill was passed into law on July 11.) This measure is designed to prevent any possibility of a legal challenge by the unions over the pay cuts. However, the new legislation has longer-term implications. By legislating these pay cuts the government has effectively abolished any mechanism for consultation with civil servants' unions and established a legal basis for further cuts and changes to civil servants' pay and benefits.

On several occasions the ILO has strongly criticised the Hong Kong government (both before and after reunification with China) for its failure to ensure collective bargaining rights in the territory. The Hong Kong government has always claimed that a mechanism of voluntary 'consultation' with unions exists in the civil service, and as such collective bargaining legislation is unnecessary. However, over the last three years the government has rejected any need for consultation with civil servants' unions over increased outsourcing, casualisation, and privatisation. The move to legislate a new round of pay cuts again exposes the failure of 'consultation' which can never replace collective bargaining rights.

According to Cheng Ching Fat, chairperson of the Personal Careworkers & Home Helpers Association, the consultation mechanism is a 'pseudo-consultation' or a kind of 'pseudo-lobbying' of the government by civil servants. Yet even this has failed, since the government has simply imposed unilateral wage cuts.

Cheng points out that this is reflected in the workplace, where the management of social welfare agencies simply post announcements of wage cuts on notice boards and call on staff to accept to the cuts.


The protest rally stretches across the city, from Causeway Bay to Central


Thousands of family members joined the march

Three weeks earlier, on June 16, a protest action was organised by three HKCTU affiliates: the Social Welfare Organizations Employees Union; the Personal Careworkers & Home Helpers Association; and the Social Welfare Workers General Union. The protest was directed against unilateral moves by the head of Social Welfare Department to impose salary changes ahead of planned cuts to civil servants' wages. Even while proposed salary cuts were being hotly debated in LegCo and opposed by unions, the director of the Social Welfare Department, Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, invited Labour Department officials into social welfare agencies to explain to management staff how to impose changes to the wage system. Angered by this arbitrary decision, the three social welfare sector unions protested on June 16, demanding the right to collective bargaining to determine their pay and working conditions.

Reflecting on the mass rally on July 7, Cheng asks why the government did not respond to their demands, even though 35,000 workers took to the streets. According to Cheng, one reason is that the large civil servants' unions themselves were too slow to act. In May and June many unions were still hoping that they could use the consultation mechanism to prevent legislated salary cuts, and attempted further negotiations. Only in late June was it agreed to take mass protest action because there was no alternative. Cheng suggests that this strategy failed to exercise pressure on the government to change its position.

Responding to calls for civil servants to be 'neutral' and not to 'politicize' their struggle against pay cuts through mass protest action, Lam Chung-ming, chairperson of the Association of Government Cartographic Staff, argued that the 'neutrality' argument is flawed. According to Lam, civil servants may be neutral when carrying out their duties in the workplace:

"But if we talk about the right to influence government policies, then we can't be neutral or non-political, because expressing this right is political. If we sit back and don't get involved in politics, then only the privileged will benefit."

Lam also noted that the recent protest actions showed that newer, smaller civil servants' unions are more active and dynamic than the big, established civil servants' unions. He points out that: "The emergence of the small civil servants' unions has meant a breakthrough in the traditional relationship between big civil servants' unions and the government, and now a new path is being charted by these smaller unions acting in unity."