A Council of Labor Affairs official said yesterday that allowing foreign laborers to work on major industrial projects will help accelerate the nation's economic development and rejuvenate the job market.
Employment and Vocational Training Administration Director-General Kuo Fang-yu justified the council's decision to allow the Formosa Plastics Group to import some 5,800 foreign laborers to work at an expansion project for the Sixth Naphtha Cracking Plant -- a mammoth development project calling for an additional labor force of some 19,300 people.
While relaxing the restrictions on imports of foreign workers, the labor council is adopting measures to protect the interests of domestic laborers, Kuo said, pointing out that the council will permit Formosa to import the foreign laborers based on a principle that the council will issue a work permit for one foreign worker for every two domestic workers added to the payroll.
Kuo noted that the government has recently liberalized a policy to allow major development and industrial projects worth NT$10 billion or more to import foreign laborers from abroad, at a ratio of 70 percent domestic workers to 30 percent foreign workers. He denied that the policy was tailor-made for Formosa Plastics.
Kuo made the remarks in response to an accusation by several KMT legislators at a public hearing into allegations that the labor council has been benefiting private business conglomerates by opening Taiwan's doors wider to foreign laborers -- ?a move the legislators said would contribute nothing to the nation's economic growth but would drive up the country's jobless rate.
Quoting labor council tallies, Kuo said that over the past two years, when the number of foreign laborers was cut by 17,000, the country's unemployment rate did not decline, but rose. The problem is that there have been no major investment projects underway, he pointed out.
According to Kuo, before the labor council restricted the number of foreign laborers some two years ago, Formosa Plastics had employed more than 20,000 foreign laborers to work on the first three phases of the construction of the Sixth Naphtha Cracking Plant.
As the three phases of expansion work have been completed, the number of foreign laborers working for the group now totals only about 1,000, he said.
Formosa is aiming to complete the NT$124.6 billion (US$3.61 billion) fourth-phase expansion project in two years.
After the fourth-phase expansion project is completed, the combined production of the plant, which produces mainly ethylene and propylene, will be worth NT$235.1 billion annually, and will help push the nation''s GDP up by 2.3 percent, according to company officials.
Formosa has invested more than NT$540 billion over the past decade in the first three phases of development of the plant, which as a whole has an output of petrochemical products exceeding NT$610 billion and has spurred production in other related industries and services worth some NT$1 trillion, in addition to creating some 700,000 jobs, Formosa officials said.
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