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":169535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[76465,84,76463,76469,10979,1294,76468,76466,6875,76472,76467,76470,71671,76474,76464,76462,3718,76471,76473,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-169534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-alice-li","tag-business","tag-chau-siu-chung","tag-chinese-culinary-institute","tag-construction","tag-economy","tag-foodpanda","tag-gurung","tag-hong-kong","tag-hong-kong-labour-department","tag-institute-of-dining-professionals","tag-international-culinary-institute","tag-john-lee-ka-chiu","tag-labour-department","tag-lingnan-university","tag-luke-ching-chin-wai","tag-singapore","tag-society-for-community-organisation-soco","tag-sze-lai-shan","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}