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He pointed out that in a survey carried out by the Labour Department last month, of more than 25,000 job advertisements surveyed, over 86 per cent of them had no age requirements, representing a three per cent improvement over a similar survey conducted in July this year.
Mr Wong said the fact that some employers insisted on employing only the relatively young had led to a perception within the community that there was age discrimination in the area of employment, and that it was adversely affecting the employment opportunities of the middle-aged, particularly women in their 40s and 50s.
To encourage fair and equitable recruitment practice, Mr Wong said he would be writing personally to those organisations which he understood maintained an age discrimination policy and inviting them to abandon such a practice.
This is in addition to organising seminars and speaking engagements and encouraging employers' associations to do their part in this regard.
Recognising the Retail Management Association's continued efforts to promote non-discriminatory recruitment practices among employers in the retail industry, Mr Wong said the appropriate factors that needed to be considered in the recruitment process should only include genuine job qualifications, for instance, educational attainment, previous work experience, or specific job-related skills.
He took the opportunity to congratulate a retail clothing group which, after some initial reluctance, is now successfully employing salesladies aged 30 and above who have undergone a retraining course specifically designed by the Employees Retraining Board for that company.
Outlining what the Government had done in recent years to eliminate discrimination in a wide range of areas, Mr Wong said his branch had set up a Working Group on Age Discrimination to ascertain the extent to which age discrimination in employment was a problem in Hong Kong, and consider what government measures, if any, should be adopted to tackle the problem of age discrimination in employment.
End/Friday, November 3, 1995