Nepali-Hongkonger Gurung has been on the job market for four months and feels he is hitting a dead end.<\/p>\n
He has been in Hong Kong for more than three decades, but this is his worst stretch of being unemployed, the fifty-something said.<\/p>\n
After losing his construction job in June this year, Gurung, who uses his surname as the name by which his friends address him, found himself competing in a market where he felt increasingly disadvantaged.<\/p>\n
At his last project at the airport earlier this year, he estimated around 40 per cent, or 2,000 of the total 5,000 workers, were not locals but imported.<\/p>\n
He suspected many were earning lower salaries than him. The poor economy prompted hiring companies to turn to such cheaper workers, he felt.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think mostly that is the one reason. Those are imported from mainland China,\u201d said Gurung, who is a father with dependants, though he declined to share further details.<\/p>\n
His predicament reveals a growing paradox in Hong Kong. While business leaders repeatedly sound the alarm over seeming labour shortages, there are local workers struggling to find work, a situation that appears to be exacerbated by the city\u2019s labour import scheme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nepali-Hongkonger Gurung has been on the job market for four months and feels he is hitting a dead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[60729,79,60727,60733,1360,179,18,60732,60730,4202,60736,19,60731,60734,17,42556,60738,60728,60726,1999,60735,60737],"class_list":{"0":"post-93835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-alice-li","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-chau-siu-chung","11":"tag-chinese-culinary-institute","12":"tag-construction","13":"tag-economy","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-foodpanda","16":"tag-gurung","17":"tag-hong-kong","18":"tag-hong-kong-labour-department","19":"tag-ie","20":"tag-institute-of-dining-professionals","21":"tag-international-culinary-institute","22":"tag-ireland","23":"tag-john-lee-ka-chiu","24":"tag-labour-department","25":"tag-lingnan-university","26":"tag-luke-ching-chin-wai","27":"tag-singapore","28":"tag-society-for-community-organisation-soco","29":"tag-sze-lai-shan"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}