Grilled by lawmakers over rumors of plans to cut back on the number of foreign laborers in a bid to boost employment rates, Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) officials yesterday repeatedly emphasized that “cutting foreign labor” was not being proposed and that it was a last-resort measure for when unemployment rates were “unacceptably high.”
Last week, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) proposed encouraging companies to cut their foreign labor force in order to create more job opportunities for Taiwanese.
“[The council] must evaluate whether [the unemployment rate] is too high … [and] how much foreign labor is acceptable to the Taiwanese people,” Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training Director General Chen I-min (陳益民) said at the legislature’s Health, Environment and Labor Committee meeting yesterday.
“To solve the root problem of a high unemployment rate, you must start with the economy,” Chen said.
Chen said cutting the number of foreign workers involves a “present” and “future” approach — laying off foreign workers could be done in the “present,” while decreasing the quotas of foreign laborers was a “future” move, he said.
“We must carefully evaluate when and how to use each tool and on what scale,” Chen said.
During the meeting, Chinese Nationalist Party Legislator Ho Tsai-feng (侯彩鳳) urged the council to “put [its] foot down” on the issue.
“Just because the MOEA suggests a cut [in foreign labor], does that mean the CLA must follow?” Ho asked.
In response to a question from Ho on whether foreign labor would be cut from “3K” industries or the number of caregivers reduced, CLA Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) said “current conditions don’t call for such strong measures,” although details were still being discussed.
“3K” refers to manual labor (the Japanese word kitsui), unsanitary work (the Japanese word kitanai) and dangerous work (the Japanese word kiken).
“Only when the unemployment rate has reached a certain level will we resort to such measures,” Wang said.
Meanwhile, Minister of Economic Affairs Yiin Chii-ming (尹啟銘) said yesterday that cutting foreign laborers in the “3K” industries may have a negative effect because it would be difficult to replace foreign workers with local ones, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported.
Because of the nature of the work, “3K” industries usually have a higher proportion of foreign workers than other industries because local workers are less willing to commit to such work.
Because it is difficult to replace foreign labor in “3K” industries with local labor, the two labor pools are symbiotic, Yiin said.
The Liberty Times also quoted Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) as saying that he would not consider cutting the number of foreign laborers.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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