Foreign fishermen on Taiwan-registered vessels are still vulnerable to labor exploitation, according to a human rights report released on Wednesday by the US Department of State.
“Mistreatment and poor working conditions for foreign fishermen remained common” on Taiwanese fishing boats, the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018 said.
“Foreign fishermen recruited offshore were not entitled to the same labor rights, wages, insurance and pensions as those recruited locally,” it said.
Photo: AP
The report said that the Fisheries Agency and the Kaohsiung City Marine Bureau were last year censured by the Control Yuan after it was found that 37 foreign fishing crew members had been living in a 60m2 illegal shore house in Kaohsiung and were being made to pay NT$300 per day for that accommodation.
The report said that under the nation’s laws, the minimum monthly pay for foreign fishers is US$450, which is significantly below the minimum wage.
“Foreign fishing crews on Taiwan-flagged long-haul vessels generally received wages below US$450 per month because of dubious deductions for administrative fees and deposits,” the report said.
Greenpeace and other non-governmental organizations (NGO) had called for Taiwan to end the separate hiring system for foreign fishers, which prompted the Fisheries Agency to dispatch officers to six overseas ports to monitor the conditions on Taiwan-registered long-haul fishing vessels when they dock, it said.
The treatment of fishers on Taiwan-registered fishing boats has been in the spotlight, particularly after the Environmental Justice Foundation, a British NGO, found during an investigation last year that the crew on one vessel had been subjected to beatings and other forms of physical abuse, and were being underpaid and overworked.
“We sometimes slept only three hours,” one fisherman on the Fuh Sheng No. 11 told the foundation. “It was like slavery. There were many cockroaches in the food ... and insects in the bedroom. I had a small boil on my leg that became so swollen that my trousers didn’t fit, and my tendon became taut. I should not have been working, but I was forced to.”
The Fuh Sheng No. 11 lacked medical supplies and safety equipment, the foundation said, citing the crew.
It also said one crew member reported that he had been receiving a monthly salary of only US$50 for five months due to deductions.
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