The Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) announced yesterday that it is working on a plan to reduce the number of foreign caregivers in Taiwan in order to boost the local caregiver industry.
"To develop Taiwan's caregiver industry was one of the resolutions of the Economic Development Advisory Conference (EDAC). In order to achieve this, we have to enable local caregivers gradually to take over the market," Liao Wei-jen (廖為仁), an official with the council's Employment and Vocational Training Administration's foreign workers' department, told reporters yesterday.
Under a draft CLA proposal to de discussed with the Ministry of the Interior, high-income families -- those in which two or more members earn NT$60,000, or more -- would be prohibited from hiring foreign caregivers and would instead be offered subsidies to offset the increased cost of hiring locals. Details of the plan are still under discussion.
The EDAC, held in August last year, passed a host of resolutions intended to develop Taiwan's economy, including a motion that "Taiwan must develop its indigenous care industry."
Liao also said that a large increase in the number of foreign caregivers in Taiwan during the past 10 months had reduced the pool of immigrant workers available to other industries under the CLA's limited quota of imported workers.
According to CLA statistics, in early October there were some 109,700 foreign caregivers in Taiwan, an increase of 8,000 since January. But since the CLA aims to limit the number of immigrant workers to about 300,000, the increase in foreign caregivers has meant that fewer workers are being made available to other sectors such as manufacturing and construction.
"We will have to consider introducing formal quotas for each industry," Liao said.
But Liao also said that the CLA believes that foreign workers are being employed ostensibly as "caregivers" when their actual duties do not involve caring. It is widely believed that such people are often employed to carry out routine home-help duties because they are much cheaper than local home-helps. Home-help is not a category of employment legally open to immigrants.
The CLA believes that some 113,000 senior citizens in Taiwan require caregivers, 29,000 of whom are catered for by Taiwanese caregivers, while 84,000 are looked after by immigrants.
The wide gap in labor costs is the main reason for local employers to favor foreign caregivers.
It costs NT$15,840 monthly to hire a foreign caregiver, NT$50,000 to NT$60,000 monthly to hire a Taiwanese.
As part of its implementation of the EDAC resolution, the Ministry of the Interior's Social Affairs Department has trained 8,600 caregivers around Taiwan, who charge NT$180 per hour for their services.
Liao yesterday told reporters that details and a timetable for the plan would be released within two weeks, after the CLA and the MOI have held another round of discussions on the issue.
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