bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

moreOnThisArticles

urlAlias

commentCount

sponsorType

authorLocations

authors

paywallTypes

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

socialHeadline

headline

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

publishedDate

additionalInfoBoxes

images

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

createdDate

sponsor

factSheets

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

copyrighted

customTimezone

liveContents

SCMP Reporter

FIVE hundred workers at Fairwood Fast Food and Mario's restaurants were laid off yesterday.

The company pledged these would be the 'first and final' redundancies, and said it had been talking to other restaurants in an effort to find jobs for the staff.

Each of the 500 received a letter informing them they had been made redundant, Fairwood deputy managing director Ng Chi-keung said.

He blamed rising costs as sales slumped and an over-ambitious expansion programme at the height of the boom in the early 1990s.

'We are laying off about 400 people from the fast food restaurants and about 100 from Mario's, about 10 per cent of the total workforce,' he said.

All the laid-off staff were branch workers such as cooks, cleaners and waiters.

'We are not touching the management,' he said.

Mr Ng said branch managers had put forward lists of people, and he could see no pattern in age, sex or length of service.

'They are people who do not perform or are not required,' he said.

'We are not doing a top-down exercise and the lists have been reviewed by the district managers, general manager and human resources manager.' A Fairwood worker said five out of about 20 staff in her Mongkok branch had been informed of the dismissal on Monday night.

'They were told to come back at 9 am and letters of dismissal were distributed by the manager,' she said.

She said an immediate reshuffle of duties was announced which increased their workload and lowered morale.

'I have to work behind the bar and clean the tables. Actually we don't have enough staff to do all the work but we can't expect the management to hire more staff in the near future,' she said.

Six of the group's 104 branches would also close this year, although Mr Ng said he could not say which ones while negotiations were going on with landlords.

'One of the mistakes we made was that we started our expansion plan in 1992-93 at the peak of the property market,' he said.

'Rent is always one of our major factors and at the time we offered rentals based on the growth rate of the past few years, when our sales growth rate was over 200 per cent every year.' Fairwood Holdings last month announced a loss of $46.82 million for the year ended in March, against a $54.36 million profit the previous year.

Other unforeseen costs such as sewage charges also led to the move, he said.

Staff with more than two years' service had received the statutory redundancy pay of one week per year of work, and everyone had received a month's bonus plus payment in lieu of notice and untaken holidays. The highest payment had been $100,000, Mr Ng said.

'We have given each of them a certificate of service to help them look for other jobs, we have been talking to other restaurant chains, and we have offered to put them on a list to be the first rehired when we have a vacancy,' he said.

The move would save the group about $4 million a month and the company believed it would be in the black by the end of the year, he said.

William Mark Yiu-tong, president of the Federation of Hong Kong Restaurant Owners, expected further layoffs in the industry, given the economic environment, adding fewer than 30 restaurants had opened in the past six months.



Fairwood lays off 500