Macau's University of Saint Joseph (USJ) insists that "it is committed to the employment of resident staff wherever possible and only employs blue-card holders when the specific skills needed are not available in Macau...", the rector of the private Catholic tertiary education institution, Prof. Stephen Morgan, said in a statement yesterday.
Macau's non-resident workers (NRWs) are informally known as "blue-card holders".
The university, which is owned by Macau's Catholic diocese and the Lisbon-based Catholic University, issued the statement in response to a statement by local lawmaker Jose Pereira Coutinho earlier yesterday.
The USJ statement said that Pereira Coutinho's statement "concerning the termination of the [employment] contracts of three Macau resident staff misrepresent entirely what he was told by the University of Saint Joseph."
The USJ statement quoted Prof. Morgan as saying that "far from replacing local staff with non-local staff, in reorganising the teaching of English at USJ, the University has been able to increase the proportion of local resident staff and reduce the number of blue-card holders in our English Language Centre."
The USJ statement underlined that the university's proportion of local academic staff has risen from 70 percent, when Prof. Morgan became its rector in May 2020, to 76 percent now. According to the statement, 97 percent of the administration staff continue to be local residents, while the proportion of total staff who are locals has risen from 84 percent to 88 percent.
Prof. Morgan also said in the statement that the employment of a certain number of blue-card holders was necessary for USJ to preserve its character as an international university, based on its role as a "platform for connecting China and Portuguese-speaking countries" and a "base for harmonious inter-cultural exchanges between East and West."
"Any suggestion to the contrary is simply untrue", Prof. Morgan said, adding that Coutinho had been told about the university's employment situation on Thursday but yesterday "chose knowingly to say exactly the opposite.
Coutinho, a directly-elected member of the Macau Legislative Assembly (AL), heads the Macau Civil Servants Association (ATFPM). He is running for re-election in September's Legislative Assembly election.
