The Quadripartite Alliance for Harmonious Employment Practices’ fight against domestic worker payrises

An interesting creature has come lumbering across the local landscape. Readers, meet the Quadripartite Alliance for Harmonious Employment Practices. I shall follow the local newspapers reporting sightings of this creature and refer to it in future as the QAHEP.

I first spotted the QAHEP in the print version of the Standard. It was squeezed into the end of an article mainly devoted to increasing unemployment figures. The QAHEP, however, was not interested in unemployment, it was interested in the minimum wage for overseas domestic workers, and wanted it frozen, on the bizarre grounds that this would be fair to civil servants.

The online version of the paper offered a whole article on the QAHEP’s gripes, which included: domestic workers taking out loans using their employer’s address – an odd complaint since the system requires them to live there and nowhere else; and “job-hopping,” or what people outside the domestic wage-slave system call “moving to a better job.”

The organisation had, it said, conducted a survey of 392 employers, 93 per cent of whom had experienced helper debt problems, and 72 per cent had been harassed by debt collection agencies. I am afraid I approach this sort of survey with a certain amount of suspicion: small sample, no information on how they were selected or how the questions were phrased. Was this, one wonders, the entire membership of the QAHEP?

Certainly not. The QEHAP’s full name is the Quadripartite Alliance for Harmonious Employment Practices Limited, and it is a company limited by shares, not a members’ club. I erroneously supposed that it might be an amalgamation of four clubs claiming to represent domestic employers. It is a sign of the times in which we live that we have no room for one independent trade union, but four employers’ associations in the same space would be perfectly acceptable.

However, there is no sign in the company records of anything like this. The QEHAP did have a previous existence as Organization of Enhance Harmonious International Employment Relationship Limited. Clearly harmony is a preoccupation, as are long names.

This may be the fault of spokesperson Chrystie Lam. Foraging on the internet, one finds Ms Lam engaging in a press conference last year (on helper debt problems already) and she’s described as the founder both of the QEHAP and of the Coalition of Home Service Sustainable Development.

Ms Lam also appeared as spokesperson for the coalition in a press conference in June, in which Sustainable Development, like Harmonious Employment (though the QAHEP was not mentioned), apparently urged for further restrictions on domestic workers. They should not be allowed to borrow money at all in the last six months of their contract, Ms Lam suggested.

Readers may at this point perhaps be thinking that Ms Lam must have had a really bad experience with an overseas domestic helper to be so preoccupied with the (indisputably genuine) problems associated with the arrangement.

But it appears actually that her engagement with the matter is professional. In her journalistic output (of which there is quite a lot) Ms Lam is described as “director of labour and welfare affairs, Chinese Dream Think Tank”.

Chinese Dream is chaired by Kacee Ting Wong, who describes himself for press purposes as “a barrister, part-time researcher of Shenzhen University Hong Kong and Macao Basic Law Research Center, and chairman of the Chinese Dream Think Tank.”

The tank in turn describes itself as “ a non-profit Hong Kong-based organization working with skilled volunteers, experts and professionals who are passionate about telling the China story.”

The direction in which the tank rolls can perhaps be deduced from the fact that recent targets have included George Soros, and Amnesty International. A further clue, perhaps, is this vitriolic (and far too long) piece on the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, published in 2023.

Well Ms Lam, like the rest of us, has the right to freedom of speech. May I respectfully suggest that this would be better exercised if she chose one hat when exercising it and wore the same one all the time? Employment harmony and sustainable development are desirable objectives, but if you are pursuing them on behalf of Chinese Dream you should say so.