After posting the Minimum Wage article on my facebook account, I’ve got the following post from my high school teacher Mr. Lai Kwok Kin, who has now chosen to retire early.

[POST OF MR. LAI]

Minumum wage would mean heavier workload, until the effect of paying more to per employee is offset by the effect of reducing the number of employees.

Take Szeto Wah as an example. He lead teachers to fight for a pay scale that is linked to the nurses, which according to Szeto some 30 years ago, had the same level of professional qualification and therefore should be paid the same. When Government agreed to this, at the same time the teachers’ workload was increased constantly until in the recent years there has been a high suicide rate of teachers. Everybody knows, that the number of hours that the average HK teacher spends inside classrooms is the highest in the World, and the time that each average HK teacher can spare on other aspects on kids (preparing lessons, talking to kids outside classrooms, etc.) is the smallest in the World. The workload of teachers has further been increased through a series of “value-adding” campaigns, like requiring teachers to do administrative work (so as to reduce the number of general office staff) and to request teachers to take up more counselling work (so as to reduce the number of social workers), and through “mainstreaming” schools, or in simple terms, merge special schools with “normal” schools, so as to reduce the number of special schools and the number of special school teachers. And to ensure that teachers are actually achieving more goals as a result of these added tasks, schools have to go through External School Review every few years.

All these amounted to a near to intolerable workload and pressure on teachers. At present, according to surveys, on average about 10% of teachers in each and every school is depressed and have thought of committing suicide. In other words, in a standard school where there are about 55 teachers, 5 – 6 of them are thinking of committing suicide. And the education and future of our kids are now under the hands of such an unstable and vulnerable workforce.

If there is no minumum wage, schools would be able to negotiate with teachers to pay each less, and hire more teachers subsequently. The quality of education would be raised, the teachers would not need to work long hours under pressure, and the spouse and childern of these teachers would be better taken care of. At present, quite a number of graduates from the Institute of Education are not able to find a job because the schools cannot share the resources with more people who needed the jobs (before Fanny Law left the EMB – now EDB – she advocated that more teachers could share a smaller number of “posts” – but she never worked out the details).

What happened in the education sector can be viewed as a life example for the possible consequencies of imposing a minimum wage on each given post.

All policies that seem to do good to the people might carry backwashes. For example, the 85000 housing policy of Tung was meant to help middle-lower class people to purchase their own homes, but the sour results that rapidly turned out was what all everyone could see and had to suffer. Before making any hastely decision, I do think that taking possible backwashes into consideration would be wise.

[MY RESPONSE]

thank you Mr. Lai you gave us a good insight …  

Free market believers think that any price control distorts the market and cripples its ability to automatically maximise the use of resources to achieve maximum satisfaction and output. In this particular case, the price control was on salary of teachers, and teachers could not have their job satisfaction which by your quoted figure they might be in a very poor situation, and the Government could not manage to produce the output as expected by tax payers either. All parties lose.

I think your highlight of the fact that 10% of teachers had the thought of committing suicide is particularly scary. Satisfaction is one thing that is not easily measurable in economic terms, but this 10% figure is way too high and I think it reflects the dire situation that teachers face.

Mr. Lai, Do you think school voucher is the right direction to go to solve the problem ? 

[FURTHER REPONSE OF MR. LAI]

Dear Lento,

Thank you for your compliment – I just portraited what I have seen as a teacher. It’s a sad thing to see that the education of HK is so much distorted by the Government.

Personally I think school voucher is something that worths trying, though I cannot see what backwash it may bring. At presentthe education system serves the parents and the children “well” in the sense that parents can leave their children in the system virtually as long as they can, and children can also evade entering into the workiforce by virtually staying in the education system forever. At present we have a 9-year “compulsory education”, which means children can get educated for 9 years for free, or complete up to F3 for free, which ever the later. In other words, a student can repeat 10 years F1, repeat 10 years F2 and repeat 10 years F3 and stay in the school campus up to 42 years old. With such a situation, children (especially the low achievers, either because of low ability or low motivation or low diligence) tend to achieve lower academically in order not to be promoted to a higher form level and hence forced to leave school and become a member of the workforce. In this sense, the education system can be seen as pulling the hind leg of the children in their academic achievement, as well as the forword momentum of the HK society as a whole.

If each child can only use a fixed quantity of school vouchers in his / her life, the child (who eventually becomes a grown-up) would need to consider carefully how the vouchers should be utilized, instead of wasting it in repeating F1 for many years. Then the children would be able to see the consequences of wasting their opportunities of being educated and would likely (hopefully) be better motivated to achieve well during their schooling, and thus may be better benefited through the education process, and at a lower cost for the society.

So to answer your question, apart from the backwash that I can yet not foresee, I do think that school voucher is right direction to solve the education problem in HK – though seems that it is not much related to the fixed salary – high worload+low satisfaction – low efficiency+depression problem of teachers.