On the face of it, a crisis over civil service pay has been averted. Anger over the findings of a survey on private-sector salaries, aggravated by police uproar about their pay mechanism, has abated. After Police Commissioner Tang King-shing's eleventh-hour intervention, unions called off a protest scheduled for June 28 - three days before the July 1 anti-government rally. Although a union representing the Leisure and Cultural Services Department called on its members to join the rally, their presence went largely unnoticed.
After weeks of political wrestling between the government and civil service bodies and police unions over the annual pay adjustment and the pay mechanism for police - which saw government officials accused of using smear tactics - the dispute has faded from the social and political scene.
Yet observers fear, and with good reason, that this is just the lull before another storm which could be more intense and hold bigger implications not just for the system governing civil servants' pay rises and pay cuts but for the way the administration of Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen governs the city.
Secretary for the Civil Service Denise Yue Chung-yee denies the administration conducted a smear campaign using leaks from 'government sources', as police unions allege. Miss Yue said she was deeply saddened by the pay disputes, which she said had damaged the image of the city's 160,000 civil servants.
To seasoned political commentator Lo Chi-kin, the damage is deeper. 'If the police unions have set a small fire by threatening to stage a rally, the government's senior echelon and Mr Tang run the risk of setting a blaze,' Dr Lo said.
Mr Tang's intervention, Dr Lo wrote in the Chinese-language daily Ming Pao, raised fears that the government has deviated from the established procedures for handling pay issues. If so, that would have bad implications for policy formulation.
