The qualified can work
With regards to the letter on foreign spouses working (Letter, Nov. 25, page 8), the writer has accidentally left out the part where any foreigner can work in Taiwan, even a spouse, if they are qualified for the job.
For example, if you have studied for four years in university to be a teacher and are thus qualified to be a teacher then you may go and teach in a kindergarten. If you are Joe Bloggs off the street and you have married a Taiwanese person but are not a qualified teacher, then you cannot teach in a kindergarten. This would also apply to being an engineer, cook or taxi driver. As long as you have the qualifications needed for the work you are applying for, then as a spouse you are legally able to do that job.
My only concern is that in the past I was refused when applying for an English teaching certificate allowing employment in government schools within a certain county. Maybe as foreign spouses we should be allowed to sit these exams that would enable us to teach in elementary, junior and senior high schools.
A. Arnold
Tainan
The letter on foreign spouses working contains an accurate description of the confusion surrounding the ability of foreign spouses to legally obtain work. However, it is mistaken in describing the exemptions for foreign spouses given in the Employment Services Act (就業服務法).
Though the act is readily available in both Chinese and English on the Internet, few government officials or foreign spouses have read it in any detail.
The 2003 revision of the act can be found in English by going to (http://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng/) and entering "Employment Services Act" in the search box on the left. The same site also has the official Chinese version. Articles 42 through 62 govern the employment of foreign workers (in addition to some articles in the Penal Provisions section).
Foreign spouses are only explicitly exempted from the requirements for obtaining a work permit. The relevant section of Article 48 reads: "However, such a requirement of Employment Permit is exempted where ... the Foreign Worker in question has been married to a Republic of China national with a registered permanent residence in the territory of the Republic of China and has been permitted to stay therein."
The act does not in any way exempt foreign spouses from any other restrictions related to foreign workers, only the requirement to obtain a work permit. Articles 49 through 51 exempt certain types of foreign workers from various restrictions in the act, but they do not exempt foreign spouses.
Unfortunately, many government officials and foreign spouses mistakenly believe that these exemptions exist in the act, which causes a great deal of confusion and differing interpretations, depending on who one asks.
A careful reading of the law finds that employers must hire a Taiwanese in preference to a foreign spouse (Articles 42 and 47), foreign spouses are restricted to certain types of jobs (Article 46), and an employer may even be required to pay funeral expenses for a foreign spouse (Article 61). None of these restrictions is exempted for foreign spouses.
In addition, many government agencies have regulations and interpretations governing foreign workers without making any distinction for foreign spouses.
In addition to restricting the types of work a foreigner may engage in, Article 46 also gives government agencies the right to set working qualifications for foreign workers.
This gives rise to the situation where a foreign worker does not need a work permit, but approval may still be required from a government agency that the foreign worker meets certain requirements.
Perhaps what creates the most problems for employers is that they are also not exempted from penalties for violating the act when hiring a foreign spouse. This causes them to be very reluctant to hire a foreign spouse if there is any doubt that doing so would contravene any requirement in the act that might lead to an expensive fine.
While it may have been the intent of the 2003 revisions to give foreign spouses unrestricted working rights, and while some government agencies have interpreted it this way, the actual wording of the act falls well short of this.
If the intent was to give foreign spouses these working rights, then foreign spouses should have been listed as an exempt category in Article 51, or have otherwise been explicitly exempted.
This lack of an explicit exemption for foreign spouses to the various restrictions on foreign workers is the source of much of the confusion on the part of employers and government agencies.
The result is that foreign spouses often have trouble obtaining work because employers don't want to deal with the headache of getting different answers on how to legally hire foreign spouses.
James Lick
Taipei
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
The Honduran elections seem to have put China on defense. The promises of trade and aid have failed to materialize, industries are frustrated, and leading candidate Salvador Nasralla, who has increased his lead in the polls, has caused Beijing to engage in a surge of activity that appears more like damage control than partnership building. As Nasralla’s momentum has grown, China’s diplomacy, which seems to be dormant since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 2023, has shown several attempts to avoid a reversal if the Liberal or the National party — which also favor Taipei — emerge as winners in the
RSS