Hong Kong’s Covid divide: Expats get more perks while domestic workers lose their homes
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She immediately told her employer, who urged her to get to a hospital. But once she was there, she said she was turned away, with staffers explaining there was no room. They advised her to go home and quarantine.
The problem? Her place of work was her home and “my employer didn’t want me to come back,” said Maria, noting that they had “kids in the house.”
“I said, ‘I don’t know where I can go. We don’t have a place,'” she told CNN Business, breaking into tears. She asked not to publish her real name, for fear of reprisals from current or future employers, and to not worry her family abroad. CNN Business agreed to call her “Maria.”
Maria, who is from the Philippines, returned to the hospital, where she spent the night sleeping on a chair in the emergency room, along with a friend in a similar situation. But the next day, they were told by a nurse more expressly to “go away,” she said.
Not knowing what else to do, they set up camp on the street.
“We cannot express what [we] feel [at] that time — just crying only,” said Maria.
Maria and her friend eventually found a shelter to stay in, run by the charity HELP for Domestic Workers.
To be sure, workers across the spectrum are struggling in Hong Kong, given its rigid pandemic measures.
Heading for the exits
Throughout 2020 and 2021, more residents left Hong Kong than came in, according to official population statistics. That marked a reversal from early 2019, when the population was going up.
Last month alone, more than 94,000 people departed the city, while only about 23,000 came in, immigration data showed.
“The recent wave of emigration is leading to a shortage of skilled workers and impacting businesses of all sizes,” the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce said in a statement earlier this month.
The group’s chairman, Peter Wong, said the city was “facing an exodus of educated workers on a scale not seen since the early 1990s.”
“This will have a material knock-on impact on the economy,” he added. “There is real cause for concern if we cannot stem the current brain drain.”
The issue has increasingly forced companies to rethink where their employees should be based, if only for now.
According to the newspaper, the hotel group recently advocated for senior executives to temporarily live abroad, away from its Hong Kong headquarters. Mandarin Oriental declined to comment to CNN Business.
Meanwhile, other players have moved away entirely.
From the start of the pandemic through the end of last year, at least 84 companies have either closed or moved their regional headquarters out of Hong Kong, according to CNN Business calculations based on government data. The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.
The exodus may not slow down this year.
The decision was based on “the requirement for proximity to relevant stakeholders and markets,” it told CNN Business in a statement.
In some sectors, bonus season typically takes place around this period, too.
“I suspect there’s a lot of international bankers who may be waiting till then before they decide whether they’ve had their fill of Hong Kong,” said a person working in the finance industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Free flights and country clubs
This exodus means that top companies in the city are working extra hard to attract — and retain — skilled workers.
Two senior headhunters in Hong Kong said that job candidates were increasingly pricing in the inconvenience of living in the city — if they were even persuaded to do so.
“Most of them are just kind of immediately saying no,” said John Mullally, regional director of Southern China and Hong Kong financial services at recruitment agency Robert Walters.
“You’ve got a smaller candidate pool, especially when it comes to those with overseas experience.”
Mark Tibbatts, managing director of Southern China and Taiwan for the agency Michael Page, described it as “an ongoing battle” that had made it “nigh on impossible” to lure international talent.
The circumstances have revived the so-called “expat package,” which had mostly been scrapped in recent years, according to both recruiters.
“Let’s go back a couple of decades. Most of the senior expats in Hong Kong were on a pretty juicy package that might have included flights home, and education, and club memberships and all these types of things,” said Tibbatts. “Over the last, let’s say, 10, 15 years, most of that’s been phased out.”
Now, some of those deals are “coming back,” he added.
That perception was more common from the 1970s to early 1990s, and back then justified more perks for businesspeople, he said.
Now, companies are “going to have to try to bring that back because … realistically, if you want to attract people, that’s kind of the package you’ll have to put together.”
Nowhere to go
As international executives jump ship, blue-collar workers and the city’s poorest are being left behind to face the darkening economic outlook.
Despite a growing shortage of domestic workers in Hong Kong, “it is not easy to say whether [the pandemic] has as a whole positively or negatively impacted them,” said Manisha Wijesinghe, executive director of HELP for Domestic Workers.
“We definitely have seen a number of domestic workers who are being offered higher than statutorily mandated wages due to the shortage of incoming domestic workers,” she said.
“But we have also seen domestic workers being forced to take on salaries lower than the minimum allowable wage … there is a power imbalance.”
From January 2020 to the end of 2021, the city’s number of domestic workers dropped from more than 400,000 to roughly 340,000, according to government statistics.
‘Zero income’
While big international firms may have the privilege to up and move, most local businesses have no choice but to hunker down.
As many as 50,000 small businesses could shut down over the city’s fifth wave of Covid, estimates Danny Lau, chairman of the Hong Kong Small and Medium Enterprises Association.
That’s about one in seven such registered entities across the city — and there could be more, he said.
Despite soaring infections, Hong Kong officials have been holding onto the “zero Covid” strategy in recent weeks, introducing social distancing restrictions that have stifled local activity.
Many places, such as beauty parlors and fitness studios, have been forced to stop operating for months until the current measures end.
“They don’t have any income. Zero income,” Lau said of those business owners. He added that some had resorted to operating secretly just to keep making a living.
Like elsewhere, small businesses had already been hit hard earlier in the pandemic, especially by the lack of tourists.
These firms were “almost half dead,” said Lau, noting that some entrepreneurs had already taken out significant loans or dug into their reserves just to stay afloat.
“The worst thing is you cannot see the future,” he added. “We don’t know how long these restrictions will last for.”
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