An agreement has been reached with Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand to raise the salaries of domestic staff and caregivers from those nations, the Ministry of Labor said yesterday.
It is the first such increase in 18 years.
Starting next month, new contracts will require a monthly salary of NT$17,000, up from the current NT$15,840.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
While wages for foreign migrant workers were originally equivalent to the national minimum wage, the minimum wage has gradually been increased over the years — most recently going from NT$19,273 to NT$20,008 at the beginning of last month — while the wages of foreign domestic staff and caregivers remained frozen.
Employers are required to provide food and lodging in addition to the minimum salary of foreign domestic staff and caregivers, who are not covered by the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
The announcement came after the Philippine and Indonesian governments last month that demanded their workers be paid NT$17,500 per month.
The ministry said it was necessary to raise the monthly minimum to continue to attract quality labor because other nations in the region offer more, including Hong Kong, where such migrant workers earn about NT$16,530 a month.
The ministry also said that it was considering raising the reward for reporting illegal foreign labor, following a protest by foreign labor agents.
About 500 agents ignored pouring rain to rally outside the ministry to protest against what they said were oppressive regulations that encouraged illegal labor.
Foreign Labor Agent Rights Self Help Association head Huang Kao-chieh (黃杲傑) said excessive regulations make it difficult to apply to hire foreign domestic help and caregivers, so many people are willing to hire runaways, even though it is illegal, and black-market salaries can reach more than NT$25,000 per month.
Higher salaries for black-market labor could account for the increasing number of foreign domestic workers and caregivers who run away from their jobs, he said.
The government fines agents when a worker absconds from their job, but then fails to take effective measures against the runaway workers themselves, Huang said.
As agents take fees from both workers and employers, they are responsible to ensure that foreign migrant workers acclimatize to Taiwan and their jobs to reduce the chance that they might run away, the ministry said.
Foreign migrant workers who run away from their jobs lose their work permits and are forbidden from re-entering the nation once they leave, the ministry said.
Additional reporting by Huang Pang-ping
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