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.”
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS