The Awakening Foundation on Tuesday criticized President William Lai’s (賴清德) proposal to ease restrictions on hiring foreign domestic helpers, warning that it risks further undermining women’s rights.
In an interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) published on Monday, Lai announced plans to expand eligibility for families with young children seeking foreign domestic helpers, with the goal of encouraging women to re-enter the workforce after childbirth. If passed, the new regulations would allow families with a single child up to age 12 to apply for a foreign domestic helper. Under the current rules, only families with at least two children younger than six qualify.
Taiwan faces severe demographic challenges, chief among them a declining birthrate exacerbated by the unequal burden of caregiving responsibilities, which fall disproportionately on women.
Ministry of Health and Welfare data from 2020 showed that more than one in five Taiwanese women leave their jobs after marriage and only 60 percent of them subsequently return to the workforce.
While Lai’s policy is well-intentioned — aiming to alleviate caregiving burdens and increase female workforce participation — it is fundamentally misguided, as it risks deepening the exploitation embedded in Taiwan’s care system, which, as the foundation highlighted, disproportionately affects migrant women.
Taiwan’s migrant workforce totaled about 820,000 last year, with foreign domestic helpers comprising more than 200,000 — or about 25 percent. Nearly 99 percent of the caregivers are women, whose labor rights remain severely underprotected.
Ministry of Labor data showed that foreign caregivers work an average of 10 hours per day, with 74.3 percent reporting no days off at weekends or on holidays. The monthly minimum wage for caregivers is NT$20,000 — NT$8,590 less than the minimum wage for Taiwanese.
Moreover, the women are excluded from protections under the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), an omission migrant workers’ rights groups repeatedly urge the government to rectify.
The labor ministry’s response has been underwhelming. It says that the unique nature of caregiving makes it “difficult” to apply the act, while efforts to implement a domestic services act to address the lapses have stalled. Worse still, the labor ministry launched its Pilot Program for Diversified Companion Care Services last year to allow care workers to serve multiple households in a day’s work, with the rules stipulating only a minimum of 10 hours of rest in a 24-hour period. Fourteen-hour workdays normalize overwork and reflect a blatant disregard for the labor rights of migrant caregivers.
Although Lai’s proposal might relieve some of the burdens Taiwanese mothers face with childcare, it would merely shift the burden onto already overworked, underpaid migrant workers.
Before loosening eligibility rules, the government should confront the gross inequities faced by foreign domestic helpers, beginning by closing the discriminatory wage gap and enforcing strict limits on working hours alongside guaranteed rest days — fundamental protections that every worker should be afforded in a democratic society.
Outsourcing childcare should not be the default solution to Taiwan’s fertility crisis. Instead, the government must prioritize empowering families to care for their own children through measures such as expanded paid parental leave, increased access to affordable, publicly funded childcare and housing subsidies for young families.
The administration’s desire to support working mothers is commendable and necessary, but true progress need not come at the expense of migrant women.
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