Analysis: Migrant Workers in Taiwan Enjoy Fewer Rights

TaiwanPlus News

Professor Yi-Chun Chien of National Chengchi University tells TaiwanPlus how and why migrant workers in Taiwan have fewer rights than Taiwanese workers and what can be done right now to improve the situation.

Transcript

00:00Professor Yichun Qian, today is International Migrant Workers Today and labor activists

00:05are protesting in Taipei.

00:07What sort of conditions are migrant workers facing in Taiwan?

00:12We have implemented migrant worker policies since 1992, so it's almost more than 30 years

00:18now.

00:19And the common conditions they are facing right now, we have this private kind of market

00:26system.

00:27We don't recruit like in South Korea.

00:29So usually when one migrant worker is coming to Taiwan, they have to go through a specific

00:36agency or specific brokers to have the connection to the specific employers.

00:41So they are very, in a way, very vulnerable to that specific employers.

00:46A lot of times they are facing very abusive working environments.

00:51They're facing sexual assaults at private households.

00:54Those are the conditions that the government and the police are really hard to detect.

00:59And very hard to find out.

01:01So those are the very vulnerable position and situation they are facing.

01:05What lies behind Taiwan's two-tiered system where migrant workers and other white-collar

01:11workers have different rights when they come to work in Taiwan?

01:16And how does the government defend these kinds of policies?

01:20So this is a very good question about two-tier system.

01:23And I think it doesn't really only exist in Taiwan.

01:26It actually exists globally in every country.

01:28So we have different policies to recruit high-skilled workers versus low to unskilled workers.

01:35Those are the jobs that we usually call 3D jobs, dangerous, difficult.

01:41And also those are the kind of jobs that local Taiwanese workers would not want to take on

01:46those jobs.

01:47We need those workers to come, but we actually don't want them to come.

01:51So in a way, we kind of, and from the economic perspective, there is a very famous argument

01:58about numbers versus rights.

02:01So for low-skilled or unskilled workers, if we want to recruit a big number, a huge amount

02:07of them that's big in number, then we provide very little in the rights.

02:13The new labor minister, Hong Soon-han, has long been a champion of improved conditions

02:17and recognizing the human rights of migrant workers.

02:21What sort of policies can he and the government initiate to improve upon these conditions?

02:27There are a lot of things that government can do.

02:29For example, as I mentioned earlier, migrant care workers are still excluded from labor

02:34standard acts, whereas the rest of the migrant workers are protected under labor standard acts.

02:40The second thing is that currently in Taiwan, migrant workers are facing a hard time to

02:46change the employer.

02:48So when they came to Taiwan and they found they don't like the working environment, there

02:52are some things they don't like.

02:54In Taiwan, if you're a local citizen, if you don't like your working environment, you can

02:58just quit, right?

02:59You can find another new job.

03:01But if you're migrant workers, you cannot do that.

03:05Currently we ask them to have the approval of the current employer, which is really hard

03:09because they have the problem, labor disputes are happening.

03:13So it's really hard for the workers to have the current employer's approval to transfer

03:17the employer.

03:18So hopefully in the future, under the current new minister, we can try to work on the policy

03:25to make it easier for the migrant workers to change the employer.

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