Hong Kong will prioritise the local workforce and ensure they get job opportunities, the labour chief has said, despite recent predictions that the city will be short of 180,000 employees by 2028.
Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han also said on Friday that encouraging young people to work in the Greater Bay Area would not exacerbate the manpower shortage.
“It will help the youth gain a better understanding of the country and may make them circulate back to Hong Kong,” he told a radio programme, noting that it would not contradict the principle of favouring local employment.
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He added that it would certainly promote Hong Kong as an international metropolis and make good use of the “one country, two systems” governing principle.
While hailing Hong Kong’s schemes of importing labour as successful in increasing the working population, Sun said people were also retiring or leaving the city which offset some import effects.
He said there were many study opportunities in the city for young people who were often equipped with tertiary education and might not want to be skilled workers.
“We only import around 10,000 skilled foreign workers as we hope to prioritise local employment,” he said, adding that the government would come up with more measures to attract young people to enter the industry.
Authorities said they were going to review the Enhanced Supplementary Labour Scheme two years after it went into effect to see how it could be improved.
Under the scheme, employers may apply to import workers at technician level or below to fill vacancies for which they have genuine difficulties in recruiting suitable staff locally.
But they must undertake a four-week local recruitment exercise for each vacancy under application.
The Labour Department will also provide active job matching to identify suitable local applicants who can be referred to employers for interviews.
Lawmaker Duncan Chiu, who represents the innovation and technology sector, said the work model in the future would change with the technological developments.
“When artificial intelligence is involved, perhaps the number of people needed to develop a game will be reduced,” he said on the same radio programme.
The government predicted manpower supply to hit 3.56 million and demand to reach 3.75 million in 2028, which would result in a shortage of 180,000 workers, based on the assumption the economy would grow by 3.2 per cent each year.
The study, conducted in 2023, analysed 17 key sectors and gathered views from more than 1,000 industry players to determine the supply and demand of manpower in the coming five years.
By 2028, more than 2 million people, or 28 per cent of the population, would be aged 65 or above.
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