Greetings. My full name is Joshua Yàthín Y̖u. I am ethnically Chinese and I was born in Hong Kong. I am starting this blog for I don't know what reasons. Most of my friends started different blogs writing different things. And it just came to my interest that we may actually learn something by reading others' blog. For instance, I find myself solving a lot of technical problems with my computer by Googling. And the Google results were surprisingly mainly blog sites. Instead of working all time on my Airline Manager in Facebook, I guess writing blog may benefit me better. Sometimes digging up things in the Internet and blog it down could be fun. So I am starting it anyway.
This is my first post. So I am not going to end it with just one paragraph of introduction. I still have no ideas of what to blog at the moment so I guess I will start with writing what I would be writing in the future. I am a classical music lover, so I may blog about classical music. I study in Computer Science so I may also blog about it. I am also a moderate gamer so I may talk about something for games, and so on. Sooner or later readers will know what my blog would be about.
At the moment, I am reading a news passage about mandatory minimum wage in Hong Kong. The page, that is in Chinese, could be found here: http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/091103/4/ezwq.html. So the businessmen recommend a wage of HKD $24 per hour. Using today's currency, it is equal to USD $3.09674. The currency calculator could be found here: http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html. It will be around HKD $5000 (USD $645.154) per month. The main concern for the government is to minimize the effect of introducing the mandate. According to the article, in 2008, there were 274.2 thousand of employees in Hong Kong receiving a wage lower than HKD $24 per hour, which was approximately 8% of all working population.
In 1999 England, the mandatory minimum wage was set at £3.6 (HKD $46.0873, USD $5.94668). There were approximately 5 to 6% of British employees affected by the mandate. This British example is one of the biggest arguments of the government to set a mandatory minimum wage of HKD $24 instead of HKD $33 (USD $4.25802), as they believe the mandate should aim to affect as few people as possible in order to maintain social stability.
The motivation behind the mandate is really doubtful. I have read some articles, which I cannot recall the source, that 1.6 million of people, out of 7 million total population in Hong Kong, satisfy the following description: Living in a 3 person household, making HKD $9000 (USD $1161.27) per month in total for the whole household, where $5000 goes to housing rent for a flat with less than 400 squared feet, while the workers are working 10 to 14 hours a day. Even a mandatory minimum wage of HKD $24 is applied, these 1.7 million of people may only see a very small effect.
Hong Kong is now the number one city of wealth inequality, with a Gini coefficient of 43.4, see http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/10/1013_biggest_rich_poor_gap_globally/28.htm, while the government is considering preserving the "economic mobility" as the main factor of deciding the level of mandatory minimum wage. I think every single Hong Kong people has the right to ask, "Is it worth doing? By sacrificing the poorests?"
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