Vietnam has agreed to step up oversight of its labor brokerage agencies, the Council of Labor Affairs said yesterday.
Taiwanese and Vietnamese officials met in Hanoi on Monday and Tuesday to discuss how to cut the runaway rate of Vietnamese workers in Taiwan.
The Vietnamese promised to revoke the license of any brokerage agency with a runaway rate of 3 percent among its clients in Taiwan.
The Vietnamese side also promised to straighten up the pre-work training institutions and to ban the recruiting of laborers in regions that tend to have high runaway rates.
Vietnam is also planning to have its local governments, instead of brokerage companies, introduce laborers to Taiwan. The fees will also be standardized to avoid exploitation of workers.
The Vietnamese side also agreed to cooperate with Taiwan's crackdown on runaway foreign workers. According to the agreement, if runaways turn themselves in, the brokerage agency that introduced them to Taiwan will be responsible for paying for their plane ticket home. The Taiwanese officials agreed to work out a plan to allow runaways who turn themselves in to come back to Taiwan at some point in the future for work.
There are more than 2,600 Vietnamese workers listed as runaways in this country, a runaway rate of 6.4 percent, the highest among foreign laborers.
Kuo Fong-yu (
Asked whether a similar strategy will be used to deal with runaways from other countries, Kuo said that every country will adopt different measures and that as long as the other countries are willing to reciprocate Taiwan's goodwill, the council will study possible cooperation measures.
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