Remarks by SLW at media session
Following are the remarks by the Secretary for Labour and Welfare, Mr Chris Sun, at a media session after attending a radio programme today morning (June 20):
Reporter: In terms of the Lai King Estate Incident yesterday, is the Government doing enough to locate the hidden elderly and care takers under stress? What's more the Government considering to do in order to stop future tragedies from happening? And regarding the Enhanced Supplementary Labour Scheme, how would that further protect the right of local workers? And would that be enough to deal with possible local unemployment in those sectors as well as striking a balance to make sure business can run probably?
Secretary for Labour and Welfare: I am really saddened by the tragedy yesterday at the Lai King Estate. I've looked back at the case, so for this case, it was not a case being taken care of by the Social Welfare Department or our non-governmental organisations (NGOs). And it is also not on the list we provided to the Care Teams to visit them. If you look deeper into the case, right now, by using big data, with the resident list provided to us by the Housing Department, as a first step, we are targeting all elderly households, who are over the age of 80. But for this case, for the tragedy in Lai King yesterday, both residents aged below 80, one is 78, one is 70.
So the next step for us is, we are looking into the possibility of not just looking at the age. Instead of looking at those all elderly households who are below the age of 80, we are looking at how we can co-operate with the Hospital Authority to include those aged below 80 who are suffering from chronic disease and require constant care. Our thinking is to include them as well.
We are looking along that direction so that we can expand our list of high-risk families. Once the list is expanded, we can hand it over to the Care Teams and visit them. If they are not under the care of our social welfare network, we can refer them to a nearby NGO to take care of them.
As for the Enhanced Supplementary Labour Scheme, our purpose of the new arrangement is to strike a balance and especially to make sure that priority is given to local workers when employers are applying for importing labours from out of Hong Kong. We are having a tier system now. So there are two tiers. For the first tier, it is still using the existing arrangement. For those that are slotting into the second tier, right now it is mainly the food and beverage services sector, they will be subject to much stricter requirements, including the ratio of local to foreign workers. Currently, the ratio for tier one is two to one, but for those being placed in tier two, it is three to one.
The base right now for tier one is the whole corporation. But for the food and beverage services sector, we divide them into two big departments. One is what we call the posts in the table service section, and the other one is the posts in the production section, mainly it's about the kitchen. And also the local recruitment period will be extended from four to six weeks, and they have to come to our local employment centres to interview local workers personally. The requirement is twice every two weeks. So by all these measures, we hope to provide as much opportunities as possible to local workers to get the jobs. But even after that stricter process, if the employers are still not able to recruit enough workers locally, we will allow them to proceed to import workers from outside. Thank you very much.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the remarks.)
The Secretary for Labour and Welfare, Mr Chris Sun, Photo source: reference image
