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
longstanding government mandate that has been contested for years.
Maria, who is from the Philippines, returned to the hospital, where she spent the night sleeping on a chair in the emergency room, along with a friend in a similar situation. But the next day, they were told by a nurse more expressly to "go away," she said.
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Two senior headhunters in Hong Kong said that job candidates were increasingly pricing in the inconvenience of living in the city — if they were even persuaded to do so.
"Most of them are just kind of immediately saying no," said John Mullally, regional director of Southern China and Hong Kong financial services at recruitment agency Robert Walters.
"You've got a smaller candidate pool, especially when it comes to those with overseas experience."
Mark Tibbatts, managing director of Southern China and Taiwan for the agency Michael Page, described it as "an ongoing battle" that had made it "nigh on impossible" to lure international talent.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/14/business/hong-kong-covid-economy-inequality-intl-hnk-mic/index.html