Late last month US authorities used allegations of forced labor at bicycle manufacturer Giant Group (巨大集團) to block imports from the firm. CNN reported: “Giant, the world’s largest bike manufacturer, on Thursday warned of delays to shipments to the United States after American customs officials announced a surprise ban on imports over unspecified forced labor accusations.”
The order to stop shipments, from the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), came as a surprise to Giant, company officials said. Giant spokesman Ken Li (李書耕) said that the CPB never visited the company’s factories to conduct on-site investigations, nor to interview or investigate specific employees. As of this writing, Giant had stopped exports to the US, though it said none of its shipments had been held at the border.
The CPB statement on the order against Giant said its investigation identified abusive working and living conditions, debt bondage, withholding of wages and excessive overtime. The CPB said that “Giant profited by imposing such abuse, resulting in goods produced below market value and undercutting American businesses by millions of dollars in unjustly earned profits.”
Photo: File photo
The report roiled the international bike industry, where Giant is widely respected as a well-run, professional firm. Local export firms and tech supply chain firms, heavily dependent on exploiting migrant labor, felt a chill. Some took it as a warning shot in support of the US demand that Taiwan move 50 percent of its chip manufacturing to the US, a move it has rejected.
WE FOLLOW THE LAW
Many local and international commentators unironically noted that Giant “follows the law” in handling its migrant workers. Long observation and personal experience of labor issues in Taiwan has made “We follow the law” my favorite evasion by government officials.
Photo: Reuters
A bike industry report quoted the Taiwan Labor Front statement saying that manufacturers need to be educated about international labor expectations, which are not always the same as local laws. For example, it said, Taiwan allows labor brokers to charge migrant workers monthly service fees directly deducted from paychecks, uncommon elsewhere.
I doubt very much that Taiwan exporters are unaware of international labor expectations, for I have had such expectations described to me in detail by numerous Taiwanese businesspeople who then went on to explain that they can’t honor them because they just “follow the law.” Moreover, as poll after poll shows, Taiwanese working people want to go overseas or work in foreign firms. If they know, the businessmen know too.
Industry insiders suspect that the source for the CBP’s complaints about Giant was a report from Danish journalist Peter Bengsten (“Speed Up! Addressing forced labor risks in Taiwan’s car, bicycle and electronics industries,” March 2025), based on interviews with migrant workers beginning in 2022.
The source the CBP used is irrelevant. Instead, Taiwan should be focused on how to change its behavior to address the problem that its treatment of migrant workers is a useful pretext for the US in shutting off Taiwan’s access to the US market.
The migrant worker pretext can’t be used directly against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), which itself employs few migrant workers. But firms in its supply chains employ tens of thousands. Their exports, and those of the firms they do business with, would make easy targets if the US wants to use migrant worker treatment as leverage against TSMC. Indeed, migrant labor is used and abused across Taiwan’s export economy, from seafood to electronics, making the entire export base vulnerable to this pretext.
Nor is it just Taiwanese firms in Taiwan. Labor unrest driven by poor treatment of workers occurs from time to time at the factories of Taiwanese firms overseas.
Ironically just last week the US said that Taiwan retained its Tier 1 status for human trafficking, its 16th straight year. The report noted numerous problems faced by migrant workers in Taiwan. Its findings would make an excellent pretext for a Trump Administration assault on Taiwan’s export industries.
Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) said last week that the ministry would also issue guidelines and assistance programs to protect migrant workers from forced labor, and that the US move was an “alarm bell” and an “undeniable operational risk.”
Vaguely enforced guidelines of course permit employers to continue to “follow the law.” Assistance to individual workers treats the symptoms, not the causes, of migrant worker abuses. Note that Hung made these comments while announcing new government subsidies for hiring and retraining workers.
Comically, he contended that Taiwanese enterprises often fail to protect migrant workers’ rights because they are not equipped to enforce labor standards (then why are they allowed to employ workers?), and that the real problem was the labor brokers.
CHANGES TO THE LAW
Lest anyone has forgotten, in 2016 when the Employment Service Act (就業服務法) was amended to make it easier for migrant workers to remain in Taiwan and find work, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬), one of two DPP legislators who sponsored the amendment, read a “no suicide” statement in the legislature because she had received death threats from labor agencies for making life easier for migrant workers, she said, asking the police to investigate if she suddenly died.
As I noted in a column a few weeks ago, the abuse of migrant fishery workers in Taiwan’s distant water fleet is not the result of a few bad apples or captains who do not know the law — effectively the claims of Hung. They are the result of a deliberate government intervention and non-intervention in migrant worker labor systems, policies that act as massive subsidies to employers.
If the labor brokers act with impunity, it is because the government shrugs. The political function of the labor broker system is thus illuminated: it enables the government to offload its sins onto “outsiders” while pretending that its hands are tied. In Taiwanese society, where people are the tongs by which other people are handled, labor brokers are the tongs by which the government oppresses migrant workers while it “follows the law.”
That is why the government will never take over the migrant worker system as so many have advocated. Without the brokers it could not evade responsibility.
The US move won’t be a wake-up call because Taiwanese employers are already aware of their behavior. But it could well force the government to make meaningful positive change. After all, the labor minister’s announcement of new guidelines and assistance was made in response to the US move. The government and local export firms are well aware that its abuses of migrant labor create negative publicity for the nation. Perhaps something as concrete as punitive measures from the US can finally get the government to give its firms new and better laws to follow.
Notes from Central Taiwan is a column written by long-term resident Michael Turton, who provides incisive commentary informed by three decades of living in and writing about his adoptive country. The views expressed here are his own.
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