The Council of Labor Affairs recently announced that it was scrapping a proposed "financial management system" under which foreign laborers would be compelled to open personal accounts at selected banks. That at least is the part of the plan that made the news -- there is more to it.
Thank heaven for that; let us be frank: Taiwan's record in dealing with foreign laborers is so abysmal that whenever some new government ordinance concerning them is proposed, cynicism and the most rigorous questioning concerning the motives behind it are entirely justified. Foreign laborers are Taiwan's great underclass, outrageously treated and utterly defenseless. Being without votes, and therefore of no political value, nobody anywhere in the political spectrum gives a damn about them. If anything, politicians try to make these unfortunates' lives even worse by pandering to the interests of their employers -- those interests revolving around getting more work for less pay and fewer fringe benefits.
In the latest case, suspicions were aroused by the different justifications given for the new plan. First we were told that it was intended to regulate outward financial flows. Then we were told that it was to discourage financial exploitation by employment agencies or employers. Well, which is it?
Probably not the first, if only because the figure the CLA gave for these currency-threatening overseas remittances was NT$72 billion a year. That's right, US$2.1 billion, which represents less than a week's trading on the local forex market, or less than a tenth of the annual interest on Taiwan's foreign currency reserves.
As to the second explanation, let us first note that no groups representing foreign workers asked for the council's proposed system. They have asked for a system which makes them less able to be pitilessly exploited by employers and brokers. But the CLA's proposals are not such a system. In fact -- this will hardly come as a surprise -- they would actually aid such exploitation, by allowing exorbitant brokers' fees to be classed as loans, repayments for which would be compulsorily deducted from workers' pay.
On top of this, the new measure would have made a significant change in the fringe benefits that overseas contract workers enjoyed. Currently, medical, funeral and repatriation costs are the expense of employers. The new scheme would have made the workers themselves liable for a significant burden of this, to be taken out of a proposed NT$3,000 per worker per month compulsory savings.
As usual, the labor council took the side of the employers in trying to get more for less. Basically the council's strategy is to bail out employers by making foreign laborers cheaper to hire. This is detrimental not only to the workers themselves, but also to local workers, by depressing salary levels, and the economy as a whole, by trying to support a low-cost manufacturing economic model that has been obsolete for a decade or more.
That the CLA has now dropped this plan -- at least for the time being -- is the result of protests by local labor groups. We congratulate them on their success.
The irony is that there are very simple measures the council might pass which would vastly improve the lot of foreign workers. For example, it would be simple enough to outlaw the notorious "second contracts" which many workers have to sign and which, they find when they arrive in Taiwan, have deprived them of most of their rights under Taiwan's labor protection laws. It would also improve the lot of foreign workers if CLA approval, following a hearing, were needed before repatriation could take place -- the possibility of being sent home on an employer's whim is a constant threat. The very fact that the CLA eschews such simple measures tells us where its real interests lie -- and those aren't with the workers.
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