論澳門《聘用外地僱員法》核心原則的實現機制

The principles of complementarity, remuneration equality, and priority enshrined in Macao’s Employment of Non-Resident Workers Law are currently confronting systemic functional failures, primarily attributable to endogenous flaws within their implementation mechanisms. First, under the administrative licensing regime, regulatory authorities are constrained by limited administrative resources and information asymmetry within the labour market. This renders the substantive verification of “local recruitment difficulties” claimed by employers arduous, thereby gradually reducing the complementarity principle to a largely formalistic notion in practice. Second, the current uniform hiring fee remains significantly lower than the actual wage differential between local and non-resident workers. This discrepancy fails to internalize the social costs associated with labour substitution, instead creating an inadvertent incentive for employers to engage in labour cost arbitrage. To resolve these dilemmas, it requires a dual-track regulatory framework that combines “economic leverage” and “administrative benchmarks”: (1) establishing a differentiated levy mechanism by drawing on Singapore’s foreign worker levy, which is essentially a pricing tool and used to dynamically moderate substitution costs; and (2) introducing a median wage benchmark – based on Hong Kong’s Enhanced Supplementary Labour Scheme – to mandate that non-resident workers must be paid no less than the median monthly wages of local workers in comparable positions.