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Foreign labor rate irks Lee Yuan-tseh

A massive introduction of foreign laborers into the country would have an adverse effect on social development, the head of the nation's top research body claimed yesterday.

Academia Sinica president Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) made the remarks while attending a seminar on foreign labor sponsored by the Academia Sinica's Institute of Economics.

Lee noted that Taiwan has between 500,000 and 1 million people working in China, mostly in managerial posts, while 300,000 foreigners here are principally engaged in manual labor.

The Nobel laureate said he had always been curious why, at a time when local businesses have been streaming out of the country and domestic unemployment has hovered between 4.5 percent and 5 percent, that there was still a "massive inflow" of foreign laborers.

The phenomenon, he said, was a result of the structure of the industrial sector and social values.

From the viewpoint of a scientist, Lee said, technological progress and automated production had caused industry to undergo tremendous change.

He noted that many repetitive operations in industry were now being carried out by robots.

widening gap

He also pointed out that labor accounts for just 1 percent of the cost of a computer produced by local computer giant Quanta, an illustration of the trend of robots replacing semi-skilled labor. With only high-level and low-level manpower in place, this had resulted in a widening of the gap between rich and poor, he said.

Lee said that because of the evaporation of the semi-skilled workforce, the overall educational environment had to be reconsidered and upgraded.

He said that local colleges and universities were not producing sufficiently skilled high-tech graduates, such that this year alone, businesses were facing a shortfall of more than 10,000 skilled personnel.

manual labor

In view of the fact that foreign laborers do mostly manual labor, Lee said, Taiwan's youth were less inclined to perform labor-intensive work.

The impression of an outsider, he added, was that Taiwanese could not endure hardship and that they were too expensive to employ in menial jobs.

Through educational upgrading, Taiwan would no longer need so many foreign laborers and the impact of a large number of foreign laborers on Taiwan's society and economy would also be eased, he said.
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