Hong Kong’s Covid divide: Expats get more perks while domestic workers lose their homes

She immediately told her employer, who urged her to get to a hospital. But once she was there, she said she was turned away, with staffers explaining there was no room. They advised her to go home and quarantine.The problem? Her place of work was her home and “my employer didn’t want me to come back,” said Maria, noting that they had “kids in the house.” “I said, ‘I don’t know where I can go. We don’t have a place,'” she told CNN Business, breaking into tears. She asked not to publish her real name, for fear of reprisals from current or future employers, and to not worry her family abroad. CNN Business agreed to call her “Maria.” Foreign domestic workers are required to live with their employers in Hong Kong, under a “The recent wave of emigration is leading to a shortage of skilled workers and impacting businesses of all sizes,” the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce said in a statement earlier this month.The group’s chairman, Peter Wong, said the city was “facing an exodus of educated workers on a scale not seen since the early 1990s.””This will have a material knock-on impact on the economy,” he added. “There is real cause for concern if we cannot stem the current brain drain.”The city has been largely The issue has increasingly forced companies to rethink where their employees should be based, if only for now. Last month, Mandarin Oriental (French spirits maker Pernod Ricard (Others may be biding their time. Hong Kong recently Now, some of those deals are “coming back,” he added.Mullally also described a rising view that Hong Kong was becoming “a bit of a hardship posting” for expats, a term that typically refers to a place with hostile living conditions.That perception was more common from the 1970s to early 1990s, and back then justified more perks for businesspeople, he said.Now, companies are “going to have to try to bring that back because … realistically, if you want to attract people, that’s kind of the package you’ll have to put together.”Nowhere to goAs international executives jump ship, blue-collar workers and the city’s poorest are being left behind to face the darkening economic outlook. It’s not just in Hong Kong: Inequality around the world has worsened throughout the pandemic, with billionaires making unprecedented gains in wealth as tens of millions of people fall into poverty. Despite a growing shortage of domestic workers in Hong Kong, “it is not easy to say whether [the pandemic] has as a whole positively or negatively impacted them,” said Manisha Wijesinghe, executive director of HELP for Domestic Workers.”We definitely have seen a number of domestic workers who are being offered higher than statutorily mandated wages due to the shortage of incoming domestic workers,” she said.’);$vidEndSlate.removeClass(‘video__end-slate–inactive’).addClass(‘video__end-slate–active’);}};CNN.autoPlayVideoExist = (CNN.autoPlayVideoExist === true) ? true : false;var configObj = {thumb: ‘none’,video: ‘world/2022/02/18/hong-kong-china-coronavirus-restrictions-business-watson-intl-vpx.cnn’,width: ‘100%’,height: ‘100%’,section: ‘international’,profile: ‘expansion’,network: ‘cnn’,markupId: ‘body-text_64’,theoplayer: {allowNativeFullscreen: true},adsection: ‘const-article-inpage’,frameWidth: ‘100%’,frameHeight: ‘100%’,posterImageOverride: {“mini”:{“width”:220,”type”:”jpg”,”uri”:”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220218064918-hong-kong-watson-pkg-still-small-169.jpg”,”height”:124},”xsmall”:{“width”:307,”type”:”jpg”,”uri”:”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220218064918-hong-kong-watson-pkg-still-medium-plus-169.jpg”,”height”:173},”small”:{“width”:460,”type”:”jpg”,”uri”:”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220218064918-hong-kong-watson-pkg-still-large-169.jpg”,”height”:259},”medium”:{“width”:780,”type”:”jpg”,”uri”:”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220218064918-hong-kong-watson-pkg-still-exlarge-169.jpg”,”height”:438},”large”:{“width”:1100,”type”:”jpg”,”uri”:”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220218064918-hong-kong-watson-pkg-still-super-169.jpg”,”height”:619},”full16x9″:{“width”:1600,”type”:”jpg”,”uri”:”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220218064918-hong-kong-watson-pkg-still-full-169.jpg”,”height”:900},”mini1x1″:{“width”:120,”type”:”jpg”,”uri”:”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220218064918-hong-kong-watson-pkg-still-small-11.jpg”,”height”:120}}},autoStartVideo = false,isVideoReplayClicked = false,callbackObj,containerEl,currentVideoCollection = [],currentVideoCollectionId = ”,isLivePlayer = false,mediaMetadataCallbacks,mobilePinnedView = null,moveToNextTimeout,mutePlayerEnabled = false,nextVideoId = ”,nextVideoUrl = ”,turnOnFlashMessaging = false,videoPinner,videoEndSlateImpl;if (CNN.autoPlayVideoExist === false) {autoStartVideo = false;autoStartVideo = typeof CNN.isLoggedInVideoCheck === ‘function’ ? 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from more than 400,000 to roughly 340,000, according to government statistics. In a recent blog post, Hong Kong Labor Secretary Law Chi-kwong pointed to flight bans from certain countries as a possible reason for the slump, saying that some workers had likely been stranded abroad.’Zero income’While big international firms may have the privilege to up and move, most local businesses have no choice but to hunker down.As many as 50,000 small businesses could shut down over the city’s fifth wave of Covid, estimates Danny Lau, chairman of the Hong Kong Small and Medium Enterprises Association.That’s about one in seven such registered entities across the city — and there could be more, he said.Despite soaring infections, Hong Kong officials have been holding onto the “zero Covid” strategy in recent weeks, introducing social distancing restrictions that have stifled local activity. Many places, such as beauty parlors and fitness studios, have been forced to stop operating for months until the current measures end.”They don’t have any income. Zero income,” Lau said of those business owners. He added that some had resorted to operating secretly just to keep making a living.Like elsewhere, small businesses had already been hit hard earlier in the pandemic, especially by the lack of tourists.These firms were “almost half dead,” said Lau, noting that some entrepreneurs had already taken out significant loans or dug into their reserves just to stay afloat.”The worst thing is you cannot see the future,” he added. “We don’t know how long these restrictions will last for.”