Obscene pay disparity won't be solved by importing unskilled workers

I wish to comment on Chief Secretary Carrie Lam's Cheng Yuet-ngor's suggestion that "we need to consider a more effective system of hiring foreign workers without jeopardising the interests of local workers" ("A greying Hong Kong must grow more nimble to survive", October 25).

We do not need more unskilled or semi-skilled workers permitted into Hong Kong.

The so-called growing "labour shortage" is exploited by big business to maintain the status quo and hold down local wages for lower-paid staff.

This was a former colonial strategy for maximising profits and maintaining the ability to pay very high salaries to expatriate officer grades.

Later, as localisation crept in and expatriates were replaced, the extreme differences in salaries and benefits were inherited but kept in place by the new class of local "officer" grades.

This is the reason there is to this day such a huge disparity in the earnings of junior and senior staff. Nowhere else in the world are these unjust and inequitable differences in benefits so great.

Some British companies here posing as Hong Kong companies even maintain their bias towards employing Caucasian expatriates, claiming that qualified local people are unavailable, "unsuitable" or "not up to standard". This is nonsense.