EF

Hong Kong’s labor movement has historically been weak, and the post-1997 government continued the anti-worker policies inherited from the British. Although Hong Kong does have freedom of association, there are no collective bargaining rights and a woefully inadequate minimum wage was only instituted in the last few years. The dominant union federation, the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, is pro-regime and is actively hostile to the movement.

The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) is aligned with the opposition and has worked to advance workers’ rights in Hong Kong and Mainland China. But the HKCTU and its member unions still do not have the capacity to sustain robust political mobilization among the working class. This relative weakness has been on display amid recent calls for general strikes.

These strikes have been organized in the decentralized networks that characterize the movement more broadly. But unions have by and large been unable or unwilling to mobilize workplace-based support. The result has been a “general strike” without organizational capacity, which means that disruption has been focused on key nodes in the transportation infrastructure.

These tactics are worth supporting — but it would be much more politically potent if done in coordination with workplace-based mobilization. Labor activists in the city are keenly aware of this issue, and are working hard at overcoming this weakness.

There are some encouraging signs that workers are being politicized in the midst of the general social uprising. Following intense pressure from Beijing, Cathay Pacific fired dozens of workers for their expressions of support of the movement, including flight attendant union chair Rebecca Sy. A campaign to get these workers reinstated was ultimately unsuccessful, but it did manage to implant the notion of “white terror” into the movement’s lexicon.

Workers in other industries have expressed interest in organizing — as much for political as economic reasons. One surprising example is the Financial Industry Employees General Union which “aims to unite fellow members in the financial-services sector to have a voice in important social topics.”

Major challenges remain for the working class to play a bigger role in shaping the orientation of the movement. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers remain quite peripheral in the political imagination. Raising economic demands has been complicated by the fact that pro-regime elements have claimed, incorrectly, that the protests are “really” about housing costs and that the political grievances are a distraction.

Hong Kong’s astonishing economic inequality is intrinsically linked to its oligarchic form of government, but lots of work needs to be done for this to become a central issue of the movement. Nostalgia associated with the colonial era is an outgrowth of understandable dissatisfaction with the present, but the territory’s past offers little in terms of a liberatory politics. Mobilizing around a new vision of a more democratic and equitable Hong Kong will be hard work.

This work is made all the more challenging by the fact that links with worker movements in Mainland China are basically nonexistent. Hong Kong activists have played a critical role in the development of worker organizations and insurgency in China over the past twenty-five years, but these links are badly attenuated today. This is due to the CCP’s unrelenting effort to smash independent forms of worker organization since 2015, including even the tamest NGOs. Receiving money or assistance from Hong Kong is in and of itself risky.

Of course, anti-Chinese sentiment in Hong Kong is a real issue and needs to be confronted, too. Some friends of mine brought posters of imprisoned Chinese labor activists to a protest in Hong Kong and reported receiving lots of inquiries and expressions of support. So, the situation is not totally hopeless for Hong Kong–Mainland solidarity, even if it is basically impossible at the moment.

That Hong Kong as an island of liberalism in a hostile sea of authoritarianism is neither normatively desirable nor practically viable. To put it provocatively, if Hong Kong cannot export “the revolution of our times” to the Mainland, it cannot succeed on its own terms.