Highly skilled blue-collar workers are being excluded from government attempts to attract foreign talent, lawmakers yesterday told a joint meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee, Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee, and Education and Culture Committee.
Draft amendments to the Act for the Recruitment and Employment of Foreign Professionals (外國專業人才延攬及雇用法修正草案) seek to ease requirements for foreign white-collar employees who want to work in Taiwan, but in-demand blue-collar workers face much more onerous rules, Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Ann Kao (高虹安) said.
“There are many migrant workers who come to Taiwan to work in our tech factories on the production lines under the Employment Service Act (就業服務法),” Kao said. “They are highly skilled workers, yet they are limited to 12 to 14 years here before they have to leave Taiwan.”
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
By limiting the employment period of foreign blue-collar workers, Taiwan risks becoming a “training center,” leaving those workers, who could have otherwise made Taiwan their home, with no choice but to move to another country, Kao said.
“With the rising importance of technology in US-Taiwan-China relations, this is a national security issue,” she said.
National Development Council Minister Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said he agreed that blue-collar talent drain is “of grave concern to Taiwanese industry.”
“It is not an issue that is addressed in the draft amendments,” Kung said. “However, we are in talks with Vice Premier Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) to deal with the problem separately.”
The talks are still in preliminary stages, he added.
Unlike blue-collar workers, “foreign special professionals” can stay in Taiwan indefinitely and have a pathway to permanent resident status, the council has said.
Foreign special professionals are described as employees who possess special expertise needed by Taiwan in science and technology, economics, education, culture, the arts, sports or other fields as determined by the authorities.
The draft includes extending short-term tax breaks offered to foreign special professionals to attract more talent, Kung said.
“We have a relatively high top marginal income tax of 40 percent versus 22 percent in Singapore and 17 percent in Hong Kong. I hope that by giving highly skilled foreign talent an extra incentive to try living in Taiwan, they will like [Taiwan] so much that they will stay,” he said.
The draft amendments seek to extend the tax break period from three to five years, the council has said.
If a foreign professional’s annual income reaches NT$3 million (US$107,852) during the five-year period, only half of the amount over that threshold would be included in gross income in the assessment of income tax liability, according to the draft amendments.
Simply cutting the tax is not being considered, because that would affect the government’s financial structure, Kung said.
However, he is upbeat that even a short-term benefit could result in foreign professionals choosing to make Taiwan their home, he said.
“People who try living in Taiwan end up loving it here,” Kung said. “We want to encourage more highly skilled professionals around the world to give Taiwan a chance.”
This time was supposed to be different. The memorychip sector, famous for its boom-and-bust cycles, had changed its ways. A combination of more disciplined management and new markets for its products — including 5G technology and cloud services — would ensure that companies delivered more predictable earnings. Yet, less than a year after memory companies made such pronouncements, the US$160 billion industry is suffering one of its worst routs ever. There is a glut of the chips sitting in warehouses, customers are cutting orders and product prices have plunged. “The chip industry thought that suppliers were going to have better control,” said
Enimmune Corp (安特羅生技) has obtained marketing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EnVAX-A71 vaccine for enterovirus 71 (EV-71), becoming the nation’s first enterovirus vaccine completely made in Taiwan, it said yesterday. After spending 13 years and NT$1.5 billion (US$49.77 million) on the research and development of the vaccine, Enimmune plans to start manufacturing and marketing it by the end of March, the company said in a statement, without disclosing customer order figures. “It is possible that the vaccine would not be included in a national vaccination program initially, and consumers would need to pay for it themselves,” parent
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining
RSS