Sonia Chan: Changes to overtime law for civil servants

The government is planning to address the law on overtime work next year, according to the Secretary for Administration and Justice, who was replying to questions arising from the 2016 Policy Address at the Legislative Assembly for the second day yesterday.
“At this moment, the cap amounts to 300 hours. But in many services the cap is not respected due to the large volume of workload. We need to have a limit to keep the health of our workers safe. We’re going to introduce changes to this next year”, Sonia Chan Hoi Fan said.
The question was raised by Legislative Assembly member Zheng Anting, who mentioned cases in which some civil servants are paid for extra working hours while others are not.
The Secretary for Administration and Justice also announced that the criteria for allotting public housing to civil servants was going to be reviewed. Ms. Chan also revealed that the government had recovered 110 public housing units which will be allocated to civil servants.
“We are reviewing the criteria that have to be met by the civil servants because at this moment only full-time workers have the right to this public housing”, she said.
The Secretary also said she expects that in the future more public housing will be allocated to civil servants using reclaimed and recovered plots of land.
Sonia Chan also promised to focus her attention this year on the more important laws that directly affect the lives of the local population.
The remaining changes to other laws will be implemented only in 2017.
“Our priority is to work on the laws we consider important for the life of the population; the others will be done in 2017. But we have to select well the laws to be changed because we don’t want to overload the Chief Executive”, she said.