HONG KONG - After 40 days of rancor and acrimony, one of this city's longest-running and most bitter labor disputes is over, but the repercussions will be felt for years to come.
As some 450 striking dockworkers agreed to return to their jobs at Kwai Tsing Container Terminals last week, no one - not the workers, not their bosses and certainly not the city that witnessed their drawn-out battle turn increasingly angry and personal - could claim much of a victory.
In the end, the workers did not win a wage increase anywhere near the 23% hike they had demanded, while billionaire Li Ka-shing - the world's richest Chinese person and once an object of
universal respect if not adoration in this money-minded city - took a blow to his image as working conditions at Hong Kong International Terminals (HIT), which he controls, were revealed to be nothing short of appalling. Operations run by Li and partner Cosco Pacific control about half the capacity at Kwai Tsing.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong, the world's third-largest container port after Shanghai and Singapore, lost cargo business to a rival port across the border in the Yantian district of Shenzhen - in which Li's Hutchison Port Holdings is the largest shareholder - that may never return to the city.
All parties emerged from this fight bruised and bloodied and, in the short term, not a great deal was accomplished.
Taking a longer view, however, the symbolism of the strike - lowly dockworkers standing up to Hong Kong's richest and most powerful man - and the considerable support it won among ordinary Hong Kong people could mark the beginning of a new chapter in labor rights for a city that only three years ago, after much wrangling, adopted a minimum wage that now stands at a paltry HK$30 (US$3.87) per hour and is currently debating the merits of implementing standard working hours.
Moreover, the striking workers were embraced by Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, and their leaders - Lee Cheuk-yan, general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and a prominent pan-democrat in the city's Legislative Council, and Stanley Ho Wai-hong, who heads the dockworkers' union - were hailed as heroes leading the city toward a more civil society.
Throughout the dispute, the ubiquitous Lee and Ho managed astutely to keep the workers' grievances front and center in the Hong Kong media, where many saw them as part and parcel of broader complaints about the city's growing wealth gap, one of the worst in the developed world, and astronomical property prices that have put the dream of owning a home out of reach for most of Hong Kong's 7.1 million people.
The union wound up accepting a pay rise of 9.8%, far below what they had originally demanded, but at the same time its leaders were able to win public sympathy by highlighting - through their media campaign and daily protests outside Li's corporate headquarters in the heart of the city - conditions and pay schemes at the port that were patently unfair and in some cases downright inhumane.
When the strike began on March 28, the 23% pay hike demanded by the union may have seemed unreasonable to the general public. Not so, however, after it became common knowledge that dockworkers were receiving on average less pay in 2013 (the equivalent of US$7.09 an hour) than they had earned in 1995 (US$7.82 an hour). Indeed, allowing for inflation, their hourly wage was nearly 20% lower than it had been 18 years ago.
In addition, crane operators on the docks were required to work 12-hour (and in extreme cases 24-hour) shifts with no breaks for meals or the toilet. They were expected to eat and relieve themselves in their cranes.
During peak season, stevedores could be asked to work up to 72 hours at a go.
Clearly, such conditions were unacceptable at a port in what Hong Kong officials like to call "Asia's world city", and ultimately, on top of their wage increase, dockworkers also won the right to meal and toilet breaks.
There is still a long way to go before workers' rights in Hong Kong are up to international standards - for example, the concept of collective bargaining, championed by Lee and Ho, remains anathema to the business elite and city officials here - but the strike at Kwai Tsing clearly succeeded in pushing workers' rights forward.
Conditions like those at the port will never be tolerated again. And the 84-year-old Li - the world's eighth-richest man and a living symbol of the rags-to-riches dream upon which Hong Kong was built - appears to have lost much of his shine. Li and his fellows in Hong Kong's tycoon class were treated like movie stars not so long ago; increasingly, however, they are ridiculed and resented for their greedy grip on the city.
The striking workers exploited this resentment by calling Li out by name early on and setting up camp outside his corporate headquarters even though, as Li's spokesmen repeatedly pointed out, HIT is not the dockworkers' employer but only the operator of the port where they work.
The workers are actually managed and paid by a group of subcontractors that shield HIT and Li from any corporate responsibility for conditions on the docks. But strikers made a point of demanding that Li come out from behind that shield and shoulder some of the blame for their plight. They even marched to his private mansion in Hong Kong's exclusive enclave of Shouson Hill to wave their protest banners and state their case.
But the big man remained silent and unseen, instead trotting out his chief henchman - Canning Fok Kin-ning, director of Cheung Kong Holdings, Li's flagship company - to launch a blistering personal attack on Lee as the chief negotiator for the strikers. Fok accused Lee of disregarding the best interests of the dockworkers to advance his own career and of employing "the style of the Cultural Revolution", the brutal, 10-year purge launched by China's Mao Zedong in 1966 to eliminate opposition to his iron-fisted rule.
"Lee Cheuk-yan resorts to every means - he doesn't want an outcome at all, hoping that as the strike drags on, he can negotiate with Mr Li so as to boost his own publicity," Fok charged.
HIT also ran full-page advertisements in most of the city's newspapers calling the dockworkers' demands "unachievable" and attacking Lee's motives.
Obviously referring to Lee, the Chinese-language version of the ad queried: "Is someone unwilling to make a deal? Is there someone who wants to achieve his own purpose and is ignoring the interests of the workers?"
As for Lee, he brushed off the ad hominem barbs, saying, "We just want to express how discontented we feel." And he, along with Ho, did indeed manage to emerge from the strike, unlike any other public figure involved, with enhanced appeal.
Secretary for Labor and Welfare Matthew Cheung Kin-chung's anemic attempt to "mediate" between the dockworkers and subcontractors did nothing to increase his popularity or to dispel the widespread perception of government collusion with big business in the city.
Remarkably, Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has barely acknowledged that the 40-day strike took place - except to reject collective bargaining as a union tool after the workers agreed to return to their jobs.
But it was clearly Hong Kong's richest man who took the biggest hit to his image. Li, once commonly referred to as Superman, is not flying so high in his hometown these days.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at kewing56@gmail.com Follow him on Twitter: @KentEwing1.
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