| We have decided to share the levy savings with our helper.
In our situation, the next levy installment will be in late September so we will be terminating/rehiring our helper at that time. As I explained to our helper, she will be making HK$100 on the new contract permanently, and we are happy to give her an additional $200 for the period of the levy suspension. I have explained to her that if/when the levy resumes, we will no longer be giving her the HK$200 extra (so her expectation is that it is only an interim bonus and not something permanent).
Based on what I've read in the papers, it seems that the levy suspension can be maximized to almost 4 years, if you decide to go through the whole early terminate/rehire exercise again before the end of the 2 years (i.e. renew now and then renew again in June/July 2010.)
I'm anticipating that there will be a bunch of fees involved in the terminate/rehire process so for the first month of levy suspension, we will be using the HK$400 to defer those costs.
Personally I believe that it should be up to the employer to do what they like with the levy. But for us, we are quite happy with our helper and thought that this seemed like a nice way to give her a bit of a bonus without it coming from our pockets.  |