ahchoii's blog

“The fare of the Star Ferry was 50 cents then, now it is $2.20,” said Marilyn who has been in Hong Kong for 24 years. “Before the salary was less but it was enough. I could buy things to send back home. Now the salary is more, but not enough for me. And they cut our salary a few years ago in the name of the retraining levy…”

When the SAR government proposed to enact laws according to Article 23 of the Basic Law, 500 thousand people went on the street to protest. The government was forced to shelf its proposal. In the same year, the government announced that a retraining levy will be imposed on employers of foreign domestic helpers while the minimum allowable wage of the domestic helpers are reduced by 11% from a monthly wage of HK$3,670 to HK$3,270. Even though ten thousand Filipino, Indonesian and Thai domestic helpers went on the street to protest, the government refused to make any concession.

By Luis Lopezllera M.

Dear friends, this is a letter motivated by our traditional day of the dead, November 2nd, today remembered in kind by a struggle between our people and bloody weapons of the so called 'law', 'order' and 'institutions'. Latin America is trying to recover dignity facing the globalization challenges. And Mexico is now experiencing convulsive moments that remind us those years we had almost one hundred years ago that led our people to produce a historic Revolution. Now we should talk better about the need of a Mutation in order to overcome our geographical fate having the U.S. Inc., not its people, as a rapacious neighbor.