Taipei Times: Could you talk about the history of Rerum Novarum (新事服利中心)?
Stephana Wei Wei (韋薇): It was founded in 1971 by a Spanish Catholic priest called Father Ellacuria. At first we provided services to Taiwanese workers and Father Ellacuria would pay visits to factories.
At the time, many of the factory workers had only received elementary education and did not really know how to interact with their employers.
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
We taught union leaders how to voice their opinions. Back then, labor unions were under the control of the Chinese Nationalist Party. Rerum Novarum had a close relationship with the Taiwan Labor Legal Assistance Organization (
We have been providing services to foreign overseas contract workers since 1986, but I only joined Rerum Novarum in 1995, when Father Ellacuria retired. Right now, we provide services related to legal issues such as employment dispute resolution and occupational injuries for domestic and foreign workers. Many of our legal and counseling services deal with occupational injuries.
Furthermore, we also help unemployed Aborigines to find jobs. After the 921 Earthquake [in 1999], we established four job centers in Central Taiwan to help Aboriginals to find jobs.
TT: What have you gathered from your professional experience about how foreign workers are treated here?
Wei: Simply put, foreign workers want to be treated like humans. They are willing to work for financial return -- their incomes. However, they hope that in the process of earning a living they can be treated with respect. In the Taipei area, many foreign workers we work with are housekeepers or caregivers. Very often, they are verbally abused and shamed by their employers.
TT: Some households who hire caregivers actually want to hire housekeepers instead. As a result, foreign workers assigned to such families end up having to perform multiple jobs; what are your thoughts on that?
Wei: It goes back to our current ban on foreign housekeepers. Although the demand for housekeepers is high, society does not provide a complementary social welfare system to take care of households with double incomes, which desperately need someone to take care of children or do domestic chores.
This need for domestic assistance cannot be filled by the families themselves, yet hiring foreign housekeepers is out of the question. Therefore, some families hire housekeepers under the guise of needing elderly care.
As the government is strict on making sure these foreign helpers do actually carry out their duty to take care of the elderly or sick, these workers end up doing everything from household chores and taking care of the elderly and children to preparing meals; in other workers, a single person is doing jobs that are normally done by about two or three people.
TT: What are some of the loopholes in our labor laws that weaken protection for foreign workers?
Wei: The Labor Standards Law (
Right now, there is an imbalance in the relationship between an employer and an employee. For instance, if there is a labor dispute between the two parties, the employer can simply state that the employee is no longer needed and be sent home. An employee cannot say to the employer, however, that his or her demands are unreasonable and request to be assigned to another employer, as it is difficult to be reassigned to another employer.
Lately we have come across a case where a foreign worker has to take care of a child, an elderly person and the domestic chores in the employer's household, in addition to working in the employer's factory. This worker was actually reported as having violated the labor law by working in the factory, since this was not part of her labor contract. However, there was no way that this worker could say no to the factory job to her employer, as she might be sent home right away.
Currently, this worker is staying at a shelter while the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) is investigating this case. If the CLA determines that the fault was on the part of the employer, then the worker might have the opportunity to work for another employer, but the employer and the employment agency have already ganged up to deny the facts and request the worker to be returned to the her employer. Although the worker only acted upon the request of her employer, she has little proof of that.
The employer and the employment agency have requested a new investigation, which drags this case on forever. This worker has been staying at the shelter for the past four months, unpaid.
This case illustrates the unbalanced legal protection between an employee and an employer once a dispute breaks out.
TT: What do you think about the employment agency system that brings in foreign workers?
Wei: I don't think there has been much improvement, even though the CLA claimed that it had replaced "commissions" with "service fees" [charged to incoming foreign workers]. According to the current regulation, a worker is charged a monthly fee of NT$1,800 during their first year of work in Taiwan, followed by NT$1,700 in the second year and NT$1,500; however, these employment agencies have to actually provide services for the money collected. Very often we discover that agencies never provide services, such as counseling and providing assistance to these workers, who have to pay a lot in these service charges.
Besides the service charges they have to pay upon arriving in Taiwan, these workers have to pay separate commission charges to the agencies back in their home countries as well. So far we know that some of these agencies in Taiwan and in their home countries are actually the same company, where one is a subsidiary of the other, which means all the fees collected are flowing into the company.
TT: What's the feasibility of the government directly importing foreign workers without going through employment agencies?
Wei: This is a social issue that leaves a lot of room for public discussion. The good thing about the government handling the hiring process directly is that the public can play a supervisory role toward the government. However, the problem with the government's direct involvement is that you will need a large number of civil servants to undertake this job. But right now, people are constantly talking about government downsizing. Besides, we also worry about the possibility of corruption that may take place once a direct importation system is employed.
TT: How is the abuse situation faced by foreign workers?
Wei: Much of it is verbal or physical abuse, even by the children of the employers. However, due to the lack of accurate statistics, we are unable to determine the exact number of workplace abuse cases involving foreign workers each year. For instance, the statistics compiled by the Ministry of the Interior's (MOI) Domestic Violence Prevention Committee is a combination of abuse cases of foreign spouses and workers. From looking at these figures, we are also unable to tell if the abusive incidents take place in factories or in private homes.
As a result, it is hard for us to come up with preventive measures with incomplete information. Furthermore, sexual abuse cases of foreign workers reported to the MOI do not tally with the numbers recorded by the CLA, which recorded only six cases of sexual abuse last year. In the Taipei area alone, the number of cases we handled last year was way more than that.
TT: When Mongolian workers were imported, the CLA believed that the more diverse the source countries for foreign workers, the greater the bargaining power of the government with other countries. How do you feel about this?
Wei: From our experience, the most exploited groups of foreign workers yielded the highest runaway rate. The Filipinos, the Indonesians and the Vietnamese workers, who have meek natures, turned out to be the groups with the highest runaway rates, just as we had expected. The government simply draws the conclusion that these groups are too hard to manage, without first considering how they have been overworked and exploited by their employers.
Increasing the number of countries from which foreign workers originate is not the solution to the problem. The host government and society need to be have a high tolerance of ethnic diversity.
Mongolians have their own culture, which if we don't understand it will lead to problems later on. The question lies in whether our society is ready to welcome such a group of people.
Mongolians are known to be descendants of a nomadic culture, which we might not really be familiar with. By hiring such a person, an employer is to take up the burden of all the consequences; foreign workers are not disposable utensils which can be discarded after usage.
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