The Government would carefully draft the labour importation scheme according to market needs, Commissioner of Labour Jacqueline Willis pledged yesterday.
She declined to reveal how many construction workers the Government would import in an attempt to meet Tung Chee-hwa's ambitious plan to build more than 100,000 flats in the next few years.
'We will carefully look into the situation and ensure that local workers will be given priority in employment. After all, we can't make any prediction on how many imported labourers will be needed because we have to see whether the local re-training programme can provide us with sufficient workers.' She said the Government would need to divide the labour import scheme into several phases, and the number of imported workers would have to depend on the number of flats built each year.
But ousted legislator Lee Cheuk-yan, leader of the Confederation of Trade Unions, who has been trying to fix a date to meet the Chief Executive for more than two weeks to discuss labour issues, said he was worried workers' interests would not be fully considered.
'I have been trying to meet Mr Tung since before the handover, but there is still no response from him. I am worried that if there is no democracy, there will also be no 'rice bowl' among workers because Hong Kong is controlled by a group of businessmen,' he said.
