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
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