Taiwan Church News

3329 Edition

December 14 - 20, 2015

Church Ministry News

Migrant Workers March For Equal Treatment And Against Sweatshop Exploitation

Reported by Chiu Kuo-rong from Taipei

A bi-annual march of migrant workers with hundreds of workers and supporters, asking equal treatment for the long-term care workers and against sweatshop exploitation, took to the streets at the Taipei City on December 13.

In order to deliver the presidential hopeful Tsai Ing-wen a letter of petition, signed by migrant worker'srepresentatives from the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, this march organized by the Scalabrini International Migration Network in Taiwan(SIMNT) started from Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building and ended at the campaign headquarters of Tsai Ing-wen. When the petition of migrant workers was handed to the representative of Tsai Ing-wen, famous human rights activist Fr. Peter Nguyen led the migrant workers at site crying:"No To Sweatshop Long-Term Care! Yes For Care Justice!"

According to Ms. Chuang Hui-ling of the SIMNT, about 770,000 people in Taiwan in need of long-term care, of whom 450,000(58%), are cared for by family members and 230,000(30%) by foreign caregivers; 4% are taken care of in institutions; the remaining 8%use government services. It is estimated that family members or foreign caregivers spend up to 14 hours a day for an average of 10 years working for people with long-term care needs. “This is a tremendous burden to [the employees] physically and emotionally, but the issue has not been recognized or heeded by the government or society,” said Liu Hsiao-ying, a counselor with the Hsinchu Catholic Diocese Migrants and Immigrants Service Center.

Inthe petition to Tsai three major requests are listed to improve migrant workers' human rights, first, an overhaul of current Taiwan's policy and administration toward migrant workers is requested to set them free from their slave status and become free workers in labor market; second, the legal rights of migrant workers should be passed through legislation and the question of "the absence of holiday" among 100,000 migrant workers should be solved immediately; third, an integral long-term care system should be established to fulfill the care justice, ensuring no party in the long-term care system(i.e. elderly and disabled people, their families, foreign caregivers and housekeeping staff) would be harmed or exploited.

Fr. Peter Nguyen pointed out there were two major conundrums encountered by migrant workers in Taiwan: the absence of legal protection on their human rights and a serious exploitation of their wages by intermediary agents. For the average migrant worker in Taiwan, usually she or he had to pay NT$ 200,000 (US$ 6,500) to her intermediary agent in advance. Considering some stipulated dedcutions from the min. legal wages as NT$ 20,008 (US$ 605) the dormitory fees, taxes, health insurance, labor insurance and miscellaneous expenses, her or his actual earning per month is roughly NT$15,000(US$ 454) only.

As a matter of fact, that Taiwan relentless laws inhibiting migrant workers to change their employers freely is also a major malign factor turning migrant workers into a modern slave!

Translated by Peter Wolfe