The Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) on Monday said it will step up efforts to get Taiwanese employers to directly hire Thai workers, but acknowledged it would be a challenge.
Only a few hundred Thais have been directly hired since employers were allowed to do so in 2008, Foreign Worker Administration Director Chen Jui-chia (陳瑞嘉) said.
Most Thai workers in Taiwan are employed in the manufacturing and construction sectors, where employers often need to hire many workers and find it inconvenient to look for workers and process the necessary paperwork on their own, opting to use manpower agencies instead, Chen said.
As of June, more than 60,000 foreign workers were directly hired, but more than 90 percent were domestic workers, he said.
Chen said the council will promote the benefits of direct hiring, as it promised to do at a recent Taiwan-Thailand labor conference, but he admitted the agency was limited to a public relations campaign because direct hiring is not compulsory.
Countries whose nationals work as migrant labor in Taiwan have wanted to streamline the hiring process to protect them from exploitation by manpower agencies and to cut out broker’s fees.
Chen said the direct-hire program benefits employers because directly-hired workers tend to be more loyal to their company and less likely to leave their jobs.
The 15th bilateral labor conference was held in Bangkok on Wednesday last week.
Among the topics discussed were increasing efforts to promote the direct hiring of Thai workers, inspection of high-risk workplaces and a review of manpower broker service fees.
Thai officials hope to reduce agency charges, but the two sides did not go into detail on the size of the reduction, Chen said.
He said the council has commissioned a study on the issue and will adjust fees for all foreign workers according to the results of the study, which is expected to be ready by the end of the year.
As of the end of last month, there were more than 465,000 foreign workers in Taiwan.
A total of 62,552 were from Thailand with all except about 800 of them working in the industrial sector, government statistics show.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching