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Following is the transcript of a media session given by the Secretary for the Civil Service (SCS), Miss Denise CY Yue, today (November 20) on the civil service pay level survey and five-day week implementation:
Reporter: Miss Yue, can civil servants expect a pay increase next year?
SCS: I do not rule out any possibility but at this point in time, I have to say we must complete the ongoing pay level survey first. Being a very optimistic person, I hope we would be able to complete that exercise around the end of the first quarter of next year. But seriously, whether I can achieve that would, to a large extent, depend on the outcome of my discussions with representatives of the staff sides.
Reporter: If the pay level survey shows that there is a great discrepancy between the government and private sector salaries, will the government still go ahead with giving a pay increase to the civil service?
SCS: The pay level survey outcome would enable us to know whether there is any gap between the current civil service pay and the pay of comparable jobs in the private sector. But that alone is not enough because after obtaining that kind of data, we would need to consider how to apply the market data to the civil service because afterall the civil service is quite different from the employment in the private sector. For the civil service, we really would like the civil service to be clean. We would like to have a stable and permanent team of civil servants providing services to the community. So we would take into account all these policy considerations before we decide how to apply the data obtained from the pay level survey outcome. After application, if there are certain civil service grades whose pay are considered to be on the high side compared with the private sector, we would then need to adjust the pay scale for these grades certainly for newcomers to the civil service. For the serving civil servants, the government has already pledged that we would not reduce the salary of serving civil servants to below the level prevailing on July 1, 1997.
Reporter: Miss Yue, can I ask you about the five-day week as well? You said 51,000 civil servants would not switch over because that would involve increasing resources. What is the problem of increasing resources for the government? Finances are quite good now?
SCS: The Government spends public resources. The Government has a duty to ensure that resources are spent in the most cost-effective manner. When the CE (Chief Executive) pledged in January this year to consider the implementation of five-day week in the Government, the CE also pledged at the same time to the community at large that the Government would not incur additional resources as a result of implementation of the five-day week. And that is why without any additional expenditure and without reduction of the hours of work for civil servants, we believe that there would remain around 50,000 civil servants that would not be able to migrate to five-day week. Nonetheless, the concerned heads of departments are considering whether other measures such as a revised rotation or a revised shift arrangement would enable slightly more civil servants to work five days for every week but not necessarily enjoying the two rest days on Saturdays and Sundays. But even after doing that, we believe that there will still be some tens of thousands of civil servants that will have to continue to work perhaps more than five days for every week.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript)
Ends/Monday, November 20, 2006
Issued at HKT 16:37
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