My Take | Think outside the box to provide care for the elderly
Surely a professionally trained care worker – imported or domestic, and supported by proper facilities – is worth several foreign maids with low skills
When Hong Kong had trouble finding people to take care of children while more mothers joined the workforce four decades ago, we started importing foreign maids. Now, as our population ages and the elderly need care at home, we are back to the same old trick – import more cheap foreign labour for domestic use.
Secretary for Labour and Welfare Law Chi-kwong has come up with some extraordinary headline numbers. We will need 240,000 domestic helpers in the next three decades, according to Law, on top of the 360,000 who currently live in the city.
Leaving aside the morality of having an underclass of 600,000 foreigners, what do these projections say about the government’s population policy, or the lack of one?
Hong Kong is not the first developed economy to face an ageing population. Japan – which has an average age of almost 47 – and Germany have had to think outside the box and experiment with innovative solutions.
Hong Kong, whose population currently has an average age of 43.5, plans to just hire more foreign maids.
It is all the more disappointing that it’s coming from Law, a former Democrat and veteran scholar specialising in social welfare policy at the University of Hong Kong.