Hong Kong's minimum wage to increase by 5.25% from HK$40 to HK$42.1 per hour
Hong Kong's lowest paid workers will get HK$2.1 (27 US cents) more in their hourly salary, from the current HK$40 to HK$42.1, under a recommendation adopted by the government's key decision-making Executive Council.
The government announced on Tuesday that the Exco had accepted the recommendation of the Minimum Wage Commission to raise the statutory minimum wage by 5.25 per cent, the first rise after a new formula for the rate adjustment was passed last year.
The revised minimum wage proposal will be presented to the Legislative Council on Wednesday next week. Subject to Legco's approval, the revised rate will come into effect on May 1.
'The [commission] believes that the new statutory minimum wage rate can maintain an appropriate balance between forestalling excessively low wages and minimising the loss of low-paid jobs, while giving due regard to sustaining Hong Kong's economic growth and competitiveness,' commission chairwoman Priscilla Wong Pui-sze said.
Because of the rise in the minimum wage, the monthly monetary cap on the requirement for employers to record employees' working hours will also be raised, from HK$16,300 per month to HK$17,200.
Employers will not need to record the working hours of their employees unless their monthly salary was below the threshold.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Asia Times
2 hours ago
- Asia Times
Francophone summit turns blind eye to Cambodia's cybercrime
The French-speaking world, as represented by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), will be holding its summit in Cambodia in 2026. So what could possibly go wrong? Plenty, actually. The OIF, which has 93 members, held its last summit in France in 2024. It has not held the event in the Asia-Pacific region since 1997, when Vietnam played host. So the idea of holding the summit in a poor country that usually struggles for attention, such as Cambodia, is logical and laudable. But everything is in the timing. The decision to hold the summit in Siem Reap, Cambodia, was announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in October 2024. It comes alongside an increasing body of evidence that organized cyber-criminals are operating inside Cambodia with Cambodian government protection. The country is the 'absolute global epicenter' of transnational fraud in 2025 and is primed for further growth in cyber-criminality, according to research authored by Jacob Sims and published in May 2025 by the Humanity Research Consultancy (HRC), a UK-based group that campaigns to end modern slavery. The Cambodian government had denied the claims made in the HRC report. The research finds that the cyber-scam industry, which relies on the forced labor of the victims of human trafficking, generates US$12.5 billion to $19 billion per year, or as much as 60% of Cambodia's GDP. An estimated 150,000 people are involved in cyber scams in Cambodia, according to the report. The HRC confirms a wealth of other research that cybercrime on an industrial scale is taking place in Cambodia, as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The HRC finds that 'endemic corruption, reliable protection by the government, and co-perpetration by party elites are the primary enablers of Cambodia's trafficking-cybercrime nexus.' 'Cambodian state institutions systematically and insidiously support and protect the criminal networks involved in transnational fraud and related human trafficking,' the report says. Many of those accused of playing leading parts or obscured but purposeful roles in organized cybercrime are either connected with the ruling regime or are its core members. Hun To, a cousin of Prime Minister Hun Manet, is a director of Huione Pay, a financial conglomerate which has been cut off from the US financial system due to its alleged role in cybercrime. Ly Yong Phat, a permanent member of the central committee of the ruling Cambodian People's Party, was sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury in 2024 for human rights abuses of trafficked workers subjected to forced labor in online scam centers. Cambodia's legal system, universally acknowledged as being completely under government control, is powerless to tackle the situation. It ranked 141 out of 142 countries globally in the 2024 World Justice Project Rule of Law Index. Among lower-middle-income countries, Cambodia ranks 38th out of 38. The idea of a global French-speaking community is in itself a dubious colonial relic. During the colonial period, France concentrated the Southeast Asian version of its mission civilisatrice on Vietnam and paid relatively little attention to Cambodia and Laos, which together made up French Indochina. French missionaries in the 19th century devised a system for transcribing the Vietnamese language into Roman letters, known as quoc-ngo, which became the national standard. The use of Chinese characters to write Vietnamese was stamped out at French insistence. This was a compromise solution in face of the extreme view of some French colonialists that Vietnam should simply abandon its language with everyone being made to speak French. There was no such romanization of the Khmer language, and the idea that Cambodia is a meaningful part of a 'French-speaking world' is a tenuous fiction. Today, the OIF estimates that only about 3% of Cambodians speak French. The historical Western focus on Vietnam as the region's main player continued into the post-Khmer Rouge period. During the 1990s, senior diplomats such as the US Ambassador to Cambodia Kenneth Quinn were specialists on Vietnam, not Cambodia. Quinn believed that the Hun Sen regime, a result of the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, was the best way to bring lasting peace and stability to Cambodia. With the country now recognized as a hub for state-protected organized cybercrime, the project has clearly not gone to plan. The best possible outcome from the summit, which the organizers may hope for, would be for Cambodia to make a sustained effort to combat organized cybercrime. We can expect some high-profile raids on cyber-slavery compounds as part of the summit preparations. However, previous Cambodian compound raids have left the organizers untouched, and the compounds have simply reappeared elsewhere in the country. Victims of human trafficking who thought they had been rescued by the Cambodian police were sold back into slavery. The evidence that the compounds are operating under government protection indicates that the pattern is likely to be repeated. If the idea is to try to hold the summit in Cambodia to make amends for the disastrous French colonial record in Southeast Asia, this is hardly the way to do it. David Whitehouse is a freelance journalist who has lived in Paris for 30 years. He has both French and British nationality.
Asia Times
3 hours ago
- Asia Times
New US nuke missile drops first-strike gauntlet on China
The US Air Force has revealed the first image of its next-generation nuclear cruise missile, signaling a significant step in modernizing the aging air-based leg of America's nuclear triad. This month, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the Air Force has publicly released the first conceptual image of the AGM-181 Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) missile, a stealthy nuclear cruise missile under development by Raytheon via the US Department of Defense's (DOD) Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS). Designed to succeed the AGM-86B Air-Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM), the LRSO will serve as the B-52J's primary nuclear strike asset by 2030. The Air Force carefully curated the image to obscure key stealth features, depicting an air-breathing missile with anhedral wings, a ventral stabilizer, and possibly a top-side exhaust, resembling the AGM-158 JASSM. The absence of a visible air intake suggests strategic concealment to preserve low observability. Awarded an initial US$2 billion engineering and manufacturing development contract in 2021, the program is slated for low-rate production starting in February 2027. Budget documents indicate a significant increase in funding from $295.5 million in FY2026 to $1.22 billion in FY2027, with a planned purchase of 1,087 units at approximately $14 million each. Armed with the W80-4 warhead and capable of subsonic speeds, the LRSO passed its critical design review in 2023. General Thomas Bussiere, commander of Global Strike Command, affirmed the program's trajectory and noted its operational relevance, even after the B-52's retirement, hinting at future standoff-capable platforms. Underscoring the urgency of developing the LRSO, Patty Jane-Geller notes in a January 2021 Heritage Foundation article that the AGM-86B ALCM entered service in 1982 with an intended lifespan of 10 years but has undergone life extension programs to last until 2030. Jane-Geller explains that advancements in Russian and Chinese air defenses degrade the AGM-86B's ability to penetrate defended airspace and that life extension programs cannot keep pace with the increasing numbers of defects found in the missiles over time. Dennis Evans and Jonathan Schwalbe note in a 2017 report for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) that the small number of nuclear-capable US strategic bombers in operation may enable a limited nuclear strike against a lesser adversary but could prove inadequate in a conflict with a nuclear-armed great power. In line with this, Keith Payne and Mark Schneider explain in an article published this month for the National Institute of Public Policy that, with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) set to expire in February 2026, the US could increase its nuclear-armed ALCMs from 528 to between 716 and 784 bomber-delivered warheads. Payne and Schneider argue that expanding the ALCM fleet won't be feasible until the LRSO becomes operational in the 2030s. By that point, they say the US may only have a limited number of nuclear-capable B-21 bombers, each expected to carry around eight nuclear bombs. They also note that due to the limited number of B-2s and the recent entry into low-rate production of the B-21, the B-52 will continue to be the primary component of the US air-based nuclear arsenal. However, they point out that the B-52's non-stealth configuration makes it dependent on ALCMs for survivability and that the legacy AGM-86B was not designed to penetrate sophisticated air defense systems in the 2020s or beyond. However, cost concerns may hinder the US's attempts to modernize its air-based nuclear arsenal. A March 2025 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report notes that the US Air Force may need up to 200 B-21s, with the aging US bomber fleet providing a rationale for increased purchases from an initial 100 planned units. Despite that, the report notes that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has reportedly asked the military services to propose an 8% reduction in their planned FY2026 budgets, with nuclear modernization exempt from those budget cuts. Additionally, the report states that placing US strategic bombers on constant alert may increase demands on costs and manpower, potentially biting into an already constrained budget. Critically, the report highlights the need for US airbase hardening in the Pacific, noting that hardening with reinforced shelters and passive defenses, such as fleet dispersion, camouflage, and concealment, is necessary to enhance protection against a surprise missile attack. Reports from Stimson and the Hudson Institute have highlighted the vulnerability of US airbases and aircraft on the ground, with US airbases in Japan, the Philippines, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands being within range of Chinese ballistic and cruise missiles, with some estimates saying as few as 10 missiles could crater runways, preventing US aircraft from taking off. That vulnerability is also compounded by a lack of US airbase hardening, with the lack of hardened aircraft shelters (HAS) in most locations, which means that most US aircraft losses in a US-China conflict over Taiwan would happen on the ground. Furthermore, the US's deficient missile defenses on key installations, such as Guam, could prove to be a vulnerability. Robert Peters notes in a January 2024 Heritage Foundation report that Guam needs a full-spectrum, permanent, 360-degree missile defense capability, but US DOD efforts to implement such have moved too slowly, while China is investing enormous sums in developing capabilities that could put US and allied bases at risk with conventional and nuclear weapons. While the US has the resources to harden and fortify critical airfields, such a move could complicate strategic stability calculations. In the wake of the audacious Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian airfields, which took out several of the latter's strategic bombers, pro-Russian defense outlet Top War notes that New START requires the US and Russian strategic bombers to be parked out in the open to be subject to satellite monitoring and inspection-based verification to prevent misperception between the two nuclear powers. Top War notes that while Russia suspended its participation in New START in February 2023, it continues to de facto abide by its provisions. In line with that logic, Tong Zhao explains in a July 2024 report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that non-nuclear US strategic actions, particularly those aimed at improving survivability or enabling conventional precision strikes, may still be interpreted by Chinese analysts as aggressive or escalatory, especially when viewed through the lens of China's 'worst-case thinking' and fear of a disarming first strike. Such a move could lower China's nuclear use threshold, with Zhao emphasizing that even defensive or non-nuclear US moves may be viewed by China as escalatory or hostile if not well-communicated, contributing to nuclear instability.
Asia Times
3 hours ago
- Asia Times
Lee's election in S Korea: The time for wishful thinking has come
South Korea has a new President. President Lee Jae-myung is a lifelong leftist with an affinity for the People's Republic of China and North Korea, and has no great love for the United States. He has referred to American troops in South Korea as 'occupiers' and said China should do what it wants to Taiwan. Lee apparently likes North Korea enough to put money down. He currently faces charges for involvement in sending $8 million to North Korea while he was governor of Gyeonggi Province. His deputy has already been convicted. However, during the recent election campaign Lee talked up the US-ROK alliance and three-way US-ROK-Japan security cooperation. Thus, many American observers claim Lee is a pragmatist and a centrist, and will govern as such. Maybe. But as likely it reflects a tendency towards wishful thinking on the part of America's foreign policy class when a certain type of radical leader comes along. The same was said about Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Turkey's Recep Erdogan, Solomon Islands' Manasseh Sogavare, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega and Cuba's Fidel Castro. Even Xi Jinping was mentioned as a reformer who just needed to solidify his position before liberalizing the PRC. But maybe these sort of men mean what they say beyond the soothing language intended for Western elites when on the verge of taking power. As for Lee, forget what he said on the campaign trial, and look at his new prime minister, Kim Min-seok. Kim was a Seoul National University radical student leader in the 1980s and joined the illegal occupation of the Seoul American Cultural Center in 1985. He was jailed for three years due to his anti-state and pro-North Korea activities. The Americans once refused to give him a visa, and he is said to have claimed the Americans were behind Covid. One recalls candidate Barack Obama who promised to 'unify' a divided United States. Once elected, he appointed Chicago political operative Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff. And America got Chicago politics at the national level. Rule #1 of Chicago politics: crush your opponents. Rule #2: do whatever it takes to keep power—forever. Don't expect centrist, conciliatory policies from Lee. Rather, we'll soon see Lee's pogrom against his opponents – to include anyone with the nerve to have called for honest elections. Lee's Democratic Party of Korea (DP) has an overwhelming majority in the national assembly – likely obtained by questionable means. He can do whatever he wants, and packing the Supreme Court appears on the menu. Lee's calls for 'restoring democracy' and unifying the nation in his inaugural speech give chutzpah a bad name. He and the DP spent the entire two years of Yoon's administration making it impossible for Yoon to govern and enact his policies. This went well beyond sharp-elbowed politics found in a normal country. Instead, it was intended to cause chaos. Nearly 30 impeachments of Yoon and his officials? Zeroing out Yoon's budget requests and more? Not exactly the behavior of a loyal opposition. Rather, Lee's election is one more episode in a years-long effort by South Korean radicals to establish single-party rule in South Korea – and align with the PRC, North Korea and even Russia. The original impeachment resolution against former president Yoon accused him of 'antagonizing North Korea, China, and Russia' and 'adhering to a bizarre Japan-centered foreign policy.' Sometimes people tell you what they really think – if you'll listen. Is this the end of the US-ROK alliance? It won't collapse tomorrow, and still has resilience. But any relationship is on shaky ground when key figures on one side dislike the other side – and would rather hook up with their partner's main rivals. Everything will get more difficult for Washington in Northeast Asia, and easier for Beijing, which has been pressuring and insinuating itself into South Korea for years. Perhaps hoping to make the best of things, the White House said the US-ROK alliance is 'ironclad' – and declared the election 'free and fair.' It did express general concern over 'Chinese interference' in democracies. The State Department similarly offered congratulations to President Lee. Free and fair election? South Korean citizens facing intimidation and lawsuits uncovered substantial evidence of widespread electoral irregularities (as they did for elections in 2020, 2022, and 2024). Did anyone at the US Embassy, the State Department or the White House even examine the evidence? Or meet with the citizen's groups? Apparently not. The foreign press has been equally lazy. As have most analysts. Rather than investigating, just call it baseless conspiracy theories. This was a gut punch to pro-alliance South Koreans, already distressed that the Trump administration couldn't be bothered to make a favorable reference to consensual government and honest elections before the polling. So maybe the Trump administration is going to wish away the problem and pretend Lee isn't what he's been all his professional life, in hopes of keeping the alliance alive. But at some point a US administration is going to discover that Lee and South Korean leftists—just like Chavez, Erdogan, Ortega and others – mean what they say. And Washington may one day find that South Korea, once solidly with the US and democracies, is quite the opposite. And, furthermore, that a system has developed in the ROK so that even if the problematic 'leader' goes away, the country is stuck and cannot re-democratize. Washington still has cards to play if it wants to support consensual government in South Korea – and at the same time preserve the US-ROK alliance. Not least is that most South Koreans don't want to go where Lee and his 'jusapa' radicals want to take them. But having a good hand requires one to actually play it. Grant Newsham is a retired US Marine officer and former US diplomat. He was the first Marine liaison officer to the Japan Self-Defense Forces and is a fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. He is the author of the book, When China Attacks: A Warning To America . This article was originally published by The Sunday Guardian. It is republished with permission.
