Ethnic minorities could provide help amid manpower shortage

Ethnic minorities, who account for eight percent of the city's population, could be a very good source of labor if employers are willing to provide more support, the Hong Kong Council of Social Service said.

Many of Hong Kong's 620,000 ethnic minorities, including over 330,000 foreign domestic helpers, are under 45 years old and can be a good source of manpower amid the labor shortage, council chief executive Chua Hoi-wai said on a radio program yesterday.

He said that ethnic minorities face difficulties in employment and some may not necessarily remain in their original job. However, foreign domestic helpers are not allowed to take non-household jobs.

"The support programs launched by Hong Kong Council of Social Service found that as long as employers provide more support, about 70 percent of ethnic minority employees are willing to stay, which is quite a high ratio," he said.

He added that about 90 percent of employers are willing to continue employing such workers.

Noel Leung Wing-ting of Lady MacLehose Centre's service unit for ethnic minorities said they have different needs now.

With many young people born and raised in Hong Kong, the difficulties they face are not issues like a lack of community resources or not knowing how to find schools but more to do with identity issues, Leung said.

"When ethnic minorities return to their home countries, they are seen as not understanding [their own] local culture and language," she said.

Sansan, a Pakistani secondary school student, said that she did not understand Chinese and had difficulty communicating with classmates when she was in primary school. She also experienced discrimination before her situation improved in high school.

By joining the HKCSS support program, Sansan got to know more friends and helped primary school students to learn Chinese.

Hina, who joined the program and serves as a Chinese teacher, said that Chinese is a difficult language to learn as in Hong Kong spoken and written languages are different.

She said as long as there are interesting, effective and systematic learning methods, ethnic minorities would enjoy learning Chinese.

According to the 2021 population census, there were around 620,000 ethnic minorities living in Hong Kong, accounting for 8.4 percent of the population, up 5.6 percent from 2016.

The majority of ethnic minorities are Filipinos (32.5 percent), followed by Indonesians (22.9 percent). Most are foreign domestic helpers.

Other major ethnic groups are South Asians (16.5 percent), mixed (10.8 percent) and whites (9.9 percent). Among South Asians, Indians are the largest group (6.9 percent), followed by Nepalese (4.8 percent) and Pakistanis (3.9 percent).

marcus.lum@singtaonewscorp.com