New rules came into effect on Friday aimed at cracking down on runaway foreign workers, with agencies facing multiple fines and withdrawal of licenses to operate if a certain number of the workers they introduce into Taiwan abscond from their workplaces.
Under the new regulations, the Ministry of Labor decreased the proportion of foreign workers allowed to go missing before it takes action, capping it at between 2.45 percent and 10 percent of the total number of workers brought in by an agency depending on the size of the firm.
That range was narrower than the 3.1 percent to 18.7 percent previously set by the ministry.
Agencies face fines of up to NT$300,000 (US$9,822) for exceeding the limit. The government plans to immediately shut down agencies that are fined four times in a year under the new rules, which means an estimated 5 percent of agencies could be shut down.
However, labor advocates for migrant workers said the measure did not address the problems that caused the migrant workers to want to break the terms of their contracts in the first place.
Migrant workers have highly inflexible contracts with employers and agencies, Taiwan International Worker’s Association researcher Wu Jing-ru (吳靜如) said.
“A heavy debt to a brokerage and the inability to leave their employer means migrant workers are often afraid to speak out about the difficulties they face, and run away as a last resort,” Wu said.
“What we see here is a voluntary human trafficking system,” Wu added, saying that if the contracts remain the same, the new fines instituted by the ministry might only exacerbate the “harsh surveillance” of the agencies.
Taiwan has 1,500 agencies that bring workers from overseas and assign them to Taiwanese employers.
As of last month, Taiwan was home to more than 530,000 migrant workers, mostly from Southeast Asian nations, currently limited to employment as industrial laborers, marine workers and household caretakers.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
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