Labour

After admiring the advanced artificial intelligence, Euterpe and I found ourselves at the entrance of the Labour Department. Yes, that’s the place where you could find hundreds of job vacancies on the notice board. Trying to teach her reading Chinese, I put Euterpe on my shoulders so that she could see some of the vacancy notices, and I read it softly aloud (if you know what I mean) for her.

To my amazement, many of the job had a salary well below the proposed minimal wage of HK$33 per hour – even for many jobs in NGOs (non-government organizations) and other not-for-profit establishments.

You may wonder: Why shouldn’t those not-for-profit organizations give a better salary to their employee, who, as many local practitioners in politics advocate, should get a sufficient sum to allow the subsistence of a family?

In no time, you would answer: Because their budget is tight.

But no. Salary usually accounts for only 60 to 70 percent of their expenditure, and there are always means to save some money in other aspects – for example, how about cooling down the salary of their senior administrators?

There’s a more simple reason.

PS. Maybe that had skipped your eyes, there is a profound implication of the suggestion to cut someone’s salary. We shall come back to this point later.