Taipei City Councilor Yen Sheng-kuan (
But Rebecca Lee (
"Apart from illegal foreign manual laborers, there are more and more illegal foreign white-collar professionals invading our job market, and it has started to pose a serious problem," Yen said in a written statement released yesterday. "Taipei has more than 200 hotels, and it is highly possible that there are more out there doing the same thing," Yen said.
According to Yen, the Lai Lai not only employs unauthorized foreign workers, but it also intimidates employees who threaten to report the matter to authorities.
"Since the hotel has good connections with the authorities, it can afford to turn a deaf ear to its employees' complaints and allows its illegal foreign senior managers to profit at the expense of its local employees," Yen said.
The councilor said the hiring of unauthorized foreign workers diminishes employment opportunities for others.
But Lee said that the senior managers in question -- Mathew Arnold from Australia and Sebastian Courage from Britain -- were employed by Destination Marketing International, not the Lai Lai. Destination Marketing has been contracted by the hotel to issue hotel dining discount cards.
Lee said the hotel has been considering terminating the contract in October when the contract expires. She said there had been many disputes between the company and its employees.
"We've been doing what we can to help them," Lee said. "We'd like to make one thing clear here: that we don't have anything to do with the dispute nor do we have any direct supervision over its employees."
Chen Hung-chi (
If convicted, Arnold may face a three-year jail sentence or a fine of not less than NT$300,000.
Preliminary investigations show that Destination Marketing is a branch company of the Hong Kong-based Hotel Dynamics International Ltd, and Arnold appears to be the front man of the company, Chen said.
According to the latest figures supplied by the Employment and Vocational Training Administration, a record 309,424 foreigners were employed in Taiwan at the end of June, up from 294,967 at the start of this year.
The number of foreign workers deported because of criminal acts has been stable since 1995, with an average of 96 deportations a year.
However, in the five-month period between November last year to March this year, 7,900 foreigners were deported -- 1,900 more than usual -- or a 76 percent increase.
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