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The Government has honoured its pledge in the Chief Executive's Policy Address last October and will put forward a bill on Statutory Minimum Wage (SMW) before the Legislative Council (LegCo) goes into summer recess next month.
The Minimum Wage Bill, to be gazetted on Friday (June 26), will be introduced into LegCo on July 8.
The Secretary for Labour and Welfare, Mr Matthew Cheung Kin-chung, described the introduction of the bill as "a significant milestone in the protection of labour rights and a landmark legislation in Hong Kong's labour history.
"Whilst we recognise that flexibility of wages and prices is crucial to Hong Kong's competitiveness and resilience to external shocks given the high degree of external orientation of the local economy, safeguarding the interests of the vulnerable and promoting social harmony are equally important social policy objectives.
"Our aim is to establish an optimal SMW regime which strikes an appropriate balance between forestalling excessively low wages and minimising the loss of low-paid jobs while sustaining Hong Kong's economic growth and competitiveness," he said.
In drafting the bill, the Government has consulted intensively and extensively various stakeholders to ensure that the SMW regime is feasible and strikes a reasonable balance among various interests.
After careful consideration of all relevant circumstances and factors as well as the views of stakeholders, the coverage of the bill will exclude all live-in domestic workers, both local and foreign.
Mr Cheung said, "The distinctive working pattern - round-the-clock presence, provision of service-on-demand and the multifarious domestic duties expected of live-in domestic workers - makes it impossible to ascertain the actual hours worked so as to determine the wages to be paid.
"This will give rise to insurmountable practical difficulties in bringing them under the SMW, which would be calculated on an hourly basis.
"Furthermore, the remuneration package for live-in domestic workers is usually distinctive for it includes, on top of wages, in-kind benefits not available to non-live-in workers. Specifically, they are given free accommodation and are spared the cost of commuting between home and workplace.
"For foreign domestic helpers (FDHs), they enjoy free food (or food allowance instead), free medical treatment, free passage from and to their places of origin, etc. To provide additional safeguard, the Government has since the early 1970s prescribed for FDHs a minimum allowable wage, currently at $3,580."
"According to legal advice, the exclusion is legally tenable," he stressed.
The Bill also proposes to exclude student internships which form a compulsory or elective part of their programmes and are required for the award of the academic qualifications in full-time locally-accredited programmes as arranged or endorsed by specified educational institutions.
The Bill covers persons with disabilities (PWDs) and provides a special arrangement for those whose productivity is impaired by their disabilities. PWDs are vested under the bill with the right to invoke an assessment of their productivity to help determine whether the PWD concerned should be remunerated at no less than the SMW rate.
To support the setting of an appropriate SMW rate, data collection is undertaken in the second and third quarters of this year and the relevant findings and information available by early 2010 will be submitted to the Provisional Minimum Wage Commission for careful and objective analysis and deliberation.
The commission will, in recommending the first SMW rate to the Government, adopt an evidence-based approach through data research and analysis as well as extensive consultations with stakeholders.
"If everything goes well and allowing time for the business sector to gear up for the implementation of SMW, the initial SMW rate is likely to come into force at the earliest by end-2010 or early 2011. In charting our way forward, we will proceed with caution and prudence," Mr Cheung said.
Ends/Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Issued at HKT 15:31
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