Hotel workers want priority for vaccines

The Hotels, Food and Beverage Employees Association said although staycations helped push occupancy rates up to 80 percent over the Lunar New Year period, they will return to below 20 percent after the holiday given the lack of visitors to Hong Kong.

A survey of about 400 hotel staff the association carried out earlier this month showed six out of 10 workers are still being made to take one or two days of unpaid leave every month.

The group’s secretary general, Nerine Yip, said a relaxation of social distancing measures from Thursday will reduce the chance of lay-offs and pay cuts.

But she said only vaccines would help the industry if another wave of coronavirus hits the territory, and hotel workers should be given priority for jabs.

“The hotel staff face different people. For example, when guests eat at our restaurants they’ll take off their masks. So our waiters have a higher risk of getting Covid-19,” she said.

Yip added that the public should also get inoculated so that Hong Kong can start welcoming in tourists again.

She also called on hotels to give their cleaners a one-off subsidy of HK$3,000 as a gesture of appreciation for their hard work, especially those at designated quarantine hotels.

The association’s survey suggested that cleaners normally spend at least an hour and a half tidying each room.

“Fifty percent of them said the room was in bad to terrible condition. They need to wear full protection equipment to clean up the room and that makes their work more difficult. Also the hotels have laid off many hotel attendants in the past few months, so they have to clean more rooms,” Yip said.

The association also called on the government to set up a temporary fund to assist hotel staff who lose their jobs because of the pandemic.