Migrant workers are scheduled to hold a march in Taipei on Sunday to call for the equal treatment of people involved in the provision of long-term care, rally organizers announced yesterday.
The biennial march this year has the theme of “care justice” —the equal treatment of seniors, the disabled, their family members, foreign caregivers and household caretakers without the threat of fear, exploitation or violence.
Scalabrini International Migration Network in Taiwan head Chuang Hui-ling (莊惠玲) said there are about 770,000 people in Taiwan in need of long-term care, of whom 450,000 (58 percent) are cared for by their families and 230,000 (30 percent) are cared for by foreign caregivers.
Photo: Huang Pang-ping, Taipei Times
Another 4 percent are institutionalized and the remaining 8 percent receive household services from the government, he said.
Hsinchu Catholic Diocese Migrants and Immigrants Service Center counselor Liu Hsiao-ying said family members or foreign caregivers spend up to 14 hours per day for an average of 10 years caring for people with long-term care needs.
“This is a tremendous burden for them physically and emotionally, but the issue has not been recognized or heeded by the government or society,” Liu said.
The burden of caring for those needing long-term care falls on families more than 90 percent of the time, with the service provided by the government in less than 10 percent of cases, Chuang said, adding that the groups feel the government needs to do more.
The marchers are expected to start on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building, walk past Taipei Railway Station and move toward their final destination — the campaign headquarters of Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who is favored to win the Jan. 16 presidential election.
All three presidential candidates have made long-term care a priority issue, but they lack substantive proposals on the provision of care, such as whether long-term care institutions should be run by business groups, Chuang said.
Chuang, Liu and other migrant worker representatives also called for the scrapping of the private brokerage system in favor of a direct nation-to-nation hiring system, allowing migrant workers to freely change employers, and ending the ceiling on the number of years migrants can work in Taiwan.
They also want to see the end of a rule requiring migrants to leave Taiwan for at least one day after the expiration of their standard three-year work contract. The groups feel that the rule gives foreign labor firms another way to exploit workers.
The sponsors said that Sunday’s rally would attract about 1,500 people, among them workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand and representatives of Taiwan’s labor unions and student and civil groups.
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
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
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