Letters | Hong Kong must cook up labour solution that revives its culinary reputation
Readers discuss a labour import scheme, the staging of mega-sports events, poetry lessons in schools, and training for those required to report child abuse
Small cafes and restaurants offering foreign fare constantly struggle to find reliable, capable staff with the energy and skills required to fulfil the role successfully. For instance, where are businesses offering foreign cuisine supposed to find junior staff with the necessary language, palate and know-how, other than from those countries? These are businesses offering foreign food; they are not training establishments.
Essentially demanding that restaurants, which are struggling with a lack of staff, stop working and that some employees instead spend a day or more at a Labour Department open day is nothing more than a costly delay to businesses that are struggling to make ends meet.
Simply put, the junior staff needed are just not in Hong Kong, and this situation doesn’t seem likely to change soon as anyone who does manage to come here as imported labour cannot settle here and is not allowed to change jobs. They must remain junior cooks and have no career progression in Hong Kong. They are not that different from better-paid domestic helpers. These eager employees won’t stay. They will return to their families or move on to other countries where their ability will perhaps be better appreciated.
The Supplementary Labour Scheme was devised as a temporary solution, probably in the vain hope that all of a sudden, a population of foreign junior cooks would sprout up in Hong Kong. It is a solution that tries to be one-size-fits-all but fails.