Michael Tien
Feb 23, 2011 
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This article isn't written to recount my acute
discomfort and humiliation, for it was mercifully short-lived. It
is to depict a life unseen by unthinking bureaucrats, uncaring
corporations and insensitive enterprises on whose radar the needs
of the working poor never appear.
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Over the past 10 years, the government, in rabid Thatcher-like
fashion, has let its outsourcing game run wild - cleaning, clerical
work and security have all been outsourced to the lowest bidder.
While setting up a showpiece commission to fight poverty with one
hand, it is creating permanent poverty with the other, rigidly
adhering to its belief in the lowest-bidder principle, in disregard
of other conditions beyond the bidding document.
Officials set the minimum wage for various job categories,
thinking that this is a sufficient safeguard against worker abuse.
No thought is given to raising the worker's productivity or
offering incentives for adding value. As a cleaner, I was given
only a big broom, a heavy metal cart to push, and a shovel -
primitive implements in the technological age.
My service area was in Wan Chai, near the Convention and
Exhibition Centre and along Lockhart Road where tourists
congregate. There, kerbside drain openings and crevices were choked
with cigarette butts and fallen leaves. But, because the government
doesn't want to see any cleaner crouch down to pick up the litter -
a preference it makes known to bidders, perhaps in fear that
crouching cleaners might sully Hong Kong's image as a modern
cosmopolitan city - a street that would normally take 10 minutes to
sweep took a whole clumsy hour. Such is the ossified thinking of
desk-bound bureaucrats who are detached from reality.
In the West, heavy-duty vacuum sweepers are standard
street-cleaning equipment, good for raising productivity and wages.
In Hong Kong, bidders win contracts because they keep equipment and
compensation costs lowest, when they should be encouraged to
upgrade their equipment and raise wages.
Outsourcing should never be thoughtlessly pursued. Consider the
case of a cook who works at the first-aid unit of the Fire Service
Department. He made over HK$10,000 a month in 2005. Now, after it
has been outsourced, the same job pays him HK$4,800. His income has
been more than halved in six years, a prime example of victimhood
through a lack of incentives for improving basic terms and
conditions. Who is creating the working poor? Who gets to pocket
the difference?
During my three days on the street, I was refused entry to
toilets in stores and restaurants. So I was forced to squat on the
slippery floor, wet with vomit, in a public toilet. Inside, I met
old "Uncle Leung", who ranks even lower than I, earning the HK$21
government-set hourly rate for toilet cleaners, while I made HK$25
as a street cleaner. The market dictates that a street cleaner's
job requires more muscle, without regard to the obnoxious nature of
the work of a toilet cleaner. In Hong Kong, the more a job stinks,
the less it pays, and toilet-cleaning is seen as a job for the old
and feeble. In this, the market is wrong. Even if it pays more,
there will be few takers.
In my case, the job pays just over HK$5,000 a month for
nine-hour days, of which HK$1,300 went to pay for my caged bed. My
15 sq ft bed space worked out to HK$85 per sq ft, far higher than
rental rates in Mid-Levels. Should the government stand idle over
this twisted market?
My job as a street cleaner required me to get going at 5am from
Jordan, as I had to arrive in Wan Chai by 6am, too early for the
MTR or cross-harbour ferry. My only means of transport was the
cross-tunnel all-night bus. But, alas, its fare is 30 per cent
higher than ordinary buses. For workers who have to scrimp their
way through each day, why can't all-night buses offer early users
the daytime rate? After all, not all night riders are lounge
lizards. A fare of HK$13.40 one way ate into my HK$50-a-day
allowance; the same trip in the day costs HK$9.80. At current
fares, I spent HK$19.10 a day on transport, including the HK$5.70
to get me home by ferry and bus. If I could pay the daytime rate
for the all-night bus, my daily food budget would have gone up from
HK$31 to HK$35.50, which would have left me enough for dinner at
Cafe de Coral (SEHK: 0341).
RTHK challenged me to find cheaper accommodation if I wanted to
eat better. Ready to give up my "luxury" bed space, I found a
lesser "luxury" going for HK$700. But the cluttered small room was
mouldy, damp and smelly, with no gas or hot water. The inside was
so dark that occupants find their way with torch light. I instantly
turned tail. I'd rather have starved than lived in that rat hole.
In a super-rich city, this is how the other half lives!
Five years ago, these HK$700 units went for only HK$400. Five
years from now, occupants of the HK$1,300 units will probably
migrate to the HK$700 ones. Luxury property prices are cascading
down to the lowest rungs of society.
Then there is the quarrel over coins. The poor count every cent.
Yet shops and eateries refused to accept my handful of coins,
despite them being legal tender. This refusal robbed me of a better
meal - the difference between HK$15 and HK$18 with my jingle of
coins.
In outsourcing its services, the government sets the standards
and sends the signals. The free market obliges. Harmony doesn't
come from slogans, it comes from all players in the market being
sensitive to the plight of the poor. It is one thing to be poor. It
is another to be victimised by an unjust system. Insensitivity
breeds inadvertent injustices.
Poverty is not a set of statistics. For three days,
in-your-nostrils poverty, once so remote, became intimately mine.
It still stinks, long after I have laid down my cleaner's
tools.
Michael Tien Puk-sun is chairman of the international
garment retailer G2000 and vice-chairman of the New People
Party
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