The Pulse：Standard Working Hours & panel discussion with Leong Che-hung and Carol Ng; Food Trucks.

With just two weeks to go before his departure, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying announced a long-awaited framework for standard working hours.
Labour activists say the plan cheats Hong Kong workers and falls far short of Leung’s election manifesto promises. Meanwhile, employers warn that actually paying workers for working excessive hours could lead to job losses.
Go out for a meal in Hong Kong and it’s a pretty fair bet that a sizeable chunk of your bill is going to a landlord. This has not been always been the case not only were rents lower, but customers had a wider choice of food stalls or dai pai dongs. Hawkers’ roadside food stalls commonly sold fish balls, sugarcane, ox tripe, dried cuttlefish in places like public housing estates, cinemas, swimming pools and parks.
In the 1970s the government decided to stop issuing hawker licenses to new operators and brought in tighter controls and restrictions for existing license holders. When this generation of dai pai dong owners dies or retires another of Hong Kong’s traditions is likely to become history.
It has been claimed that the introduction of food trucks provides some kind of replacement for this dwindling heritage. That’s questionable on a number of levels not least when the new scheme’s highly bureaucratic nature, lack of flexibility for moving the trucks around and high cost to customers is taken into account.
We’ll leave you with a reminder from London of the tragic cost of high rise living when in literally minutes a home turns into a blazing inferno with heavy loss of life – no doubt in hi-rise Hong Kong there are also some sobering lessons to be learned.