Migrant Workers Demonstrate for Inclusion in Long-Term Healthcare System

by Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Holly Cheng/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
MIGRANT WORKERS demonstrated outside of the Ministry of Health and Welfare earlier this month, to call for the inclusion of migrant caregivers in the long-term healthcare system.
Migrant workers are currently excluded from labor laws that apply to Taiwanese workers, such as the Labor Standards Act. This, too, is the case with migrant caregivers who take care of the elderly, at a time in which due to the declining birthrate and rising elderly population, Taiwan is on the precipice of becoming a “super-aged” society.
After all, such migrant caregivers often live at home with those that they take care of. Consequently, they have no set working hours, and instead end up working twenty-four hours, perhaps seven days a week. If they are fortunate, they get one day off per week. Likewise, migrant caregivers have no separation between their home and workplace, often living in small rooms, as an afterthought. Even if there has been more international attention to migrant workers on distant water fishing vessels that return to Taiwan only once every several years as sites in which migrant workers endure conditions that have been termed modern slavery, this could also be said of some domestic caregivers.
Yet though working under such conditions would be flagrantly illegal for Taiwanese workers, the lack of inclusion in the Labor Standards Act is what allows this to take place. Consequently, calls by migrant workers for caregivers to be included in the long-term healthcare system is part of the call for labor laws that apply to Taiwanese workers to also apply to blue-collar migrant workers, usually from Southeast Asia.
As such, calls are that Taiwan’s 210,000 migrant caregivers be hired by government care institutions, rather than be employed directly by families. The current system of employment is criticized as allowing for such conditions.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare. Photo credit: Solomon203/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
However, one also notes that this echoes broader calls for more state intervention in regulating migrant work. For example, migrant workers currently have to pay exorbitant fees to labor brokers that provide for their transportation to Taiwan, as well as work arrangements. Yet labor brokers charge fees at every stage of the migrant work process, including owning the loan agencies that migrant workers then take loans for in order to pay brokers.
Migrant workers and migrant advocacy groups have thus called for direct government-to-government hiring in a way that does not require the involvement of brokers. Despite this, the Taiwanese government has continued to claim that brokers play a necessary role in the market, and has pushed back against governments of sending countries that try to move away from the broker system, such as the Indonesian government.
In the meantime, industry groups continue to exercise an enormous amount of power over migrant worker policy. At present, the hospitality industry organizations are calling for the hospitality industry to be opened up to migrant workers.
The government has demurred on the issue, citing that the hospitality industry is reluctant to raise wages for Taiwanese workers, and so hopes to allow for migrant workers. But this points to the dynamics of migrant work policy in Taiwan. Apart from that migrant workers historically take on the “3D”—so-called “dirty, dangerous, and demeaning” jobs that Taiwanese workers do not want–shifts in migrant worker policy are proposed as part of cost-cutting by industry groups.
Indeed, it would be a major shift if hospitality jobs were opened to migrant workers. This could potentially lead to migrant workers eventually taking up blue-collar jobs that are not in the current categories of employment. This call also takes place at the same time as Taiwan moves forward on plans to allow for Indian migrant workers, as the fifth major sending country for migrant work.
Yet, as a whole, even if Taiwan is considering shifts in migrant work policy, there has not been any substantive shift to allow for immigration by migrant workers. Migrant workers still travel to Taiwan on the basis of their traveling alone, as individuals, without their families. It may not be surprising then, that those who are able to stay in Taiwan past the 12 to 14 year limit on migrant work are often those who marry Taiwanese–and even then, in case of divorce, some individuals are forced to leave Taiwan even if that means separation from their children.
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