Employment for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in China's Hong Kong has declined, a migrant group said.

From January to May this year, the number of OFWs in Hong Kong dropped from about 135,000 to 125,000, registering a 7.4 percent decrease in OFW employment there, the Philippine Daily Inquirer online news Friday quoted the Hong Kong-based Center for Migrant Advocacy board member Daphne Ceniza-Kuok as saying.

"The labor market in Hong Kong is really shrinking and nationals from other countries are under-cutting the wages too," she said.

The Society of Hongkong Accredited Recruiters of the Philippines confirmed the decline.

The society President Alfredo Palmiery said although Filipinos continued to dominate the domestic Hong Kong service market, the Indonesians were "slowly but steadily penetrating it," especially amid the economic downturn that resulted from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic in 2002.

As of April 2004, there were 217,000 foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong, of which, 57 percent or 124,720 are Filipinos, while38 percent are Indonesians. The rest are Sri Lankans, Indians, and Vietnamese, according to the industry official.

Globally, an estimated 8 million OFWs remit back home an average of more than 7 billion US dollars annually to keep the country's economy afloat.

Source: Xinhua