The Control Yuan yesterday censured the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Labor and the National Immigration Agency over cases involving the exploitation of foreign students.
They were reprimanded for dereliction of duty, failure to fulfill supervisory responsibilities and not enforcing rules, among other transgressions.
An investigation by the Control Yuan focused on several cases over the past few years in which recruitment firms and labor brokers colluded with school officials to use foreign students as cheap labor.
Photo: Taipei Times file
“These cases have ... severely harmed Taiwan’s international image,” Control Yuan members Wang Mei-yu (王美玉), Yeh Ta-hua (葉大華) and Wang Yu-ling (王幼玲), who conducted the investigation, said in their report.
In one prominent case cited in the probe, 16 students from Uganda in 2019 were promised scholarships and internships if they enrolled at Chung Chou University of Science and Technology in Changhua County
The university told the Ugandans upon arrival that they were each NT$100,000 in debt and would have to pay it off while studying by working at a factory in Miaoli County.
A judicial investigation led to the indictment of 10 people last year, including Miaoli County Labor and Youth Development Department deputy head Tu Jung-hui (涂榮輝), other local government officials and Chung Chou University of Science and Technology Vice Principal Tsai Fang-wu (柴鈁武) for corruption, forgery and breaching the Employment Service Act (就業服務法) and the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
Control Yuan members in April approved a motion to impeach Tu and three other Miaoli County officials for covering up repeated labor standards contraventions, limiting the scope of an internal school investigation and colluding with a Miaoli-based foreign labor brokerage firm to exploit the Ugandan students.
The Control Yuan said in a statement that the government officials had been negligent; the education and labor ministries should have, but did not, cooperate on administrative tasks related to overseeing foreign student programs; and checks and balances had not been set up.
It also cited failures in management and rule enforcement.
Top officials at the education and labor ministries “did not strive to solve these problems and issues ... [and] took few proactive measures to prevent rights violations and unfair labor exploitation,” the statement said.
A National Immigration Agency official in central Taiwan leaked confidential materials when colluding with the university, which they gained by accessing the internal database to track the Ugandan students’ whereabouts, enabling the university to demand payments, it said.
Other cases in which foreign students were exploited as low-paid laborers involved Yu Da University of Science and Technology in Miaoli County, University of Kang Ning in Taipei and Chienkuo Technology University in Changhua City, the statement said.
“Taiwan’s programs recruiting foreign students to obtain degrees and training have good intentions,” it said. “However, unscrupulous businesses and brokerage firms used these programs, finding loopholes to exploit students as a source of cheap labor. In doing so, they profited by conspiring with schools to saddle the students with debts, forcing them into low-paid factory jobs.”
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