The Council of Labor Affairs is mulling a proposal to include foreign laborers who work as domestic laborers and caregivers under the country’s labor regulations.
The proposed amendment to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) would extend regulations to include the foreign laborers and would provide guidelines on personal leave, for example requiring a minimum of seven days of personal leave once the worker has worked for a year.
The proposal would also make the nation’s minimum wage applicable to domestic help and caregivers. More than 170,000 workers in the country would earn at least NT$17,280 a month, the current minimum wage.
The amendment may require employers to insure workers under the National Labor Insurance Program so workers could receive compensation in the event of work injury.
The proposed changes are to protect workers’ rights, council officials said.
For years, migrant workers’ groups have urged the council to protect their work benefits and right to take leave. However, the council has rebuffed the effort, saying a “home” is not a place for making profits so it differs from the definition of a workplace or factory as defined in the Labor Standards Act.
The council also said because of the nature of their work, it is difficult to distinguish between time resting and being on stand-by.
Council officials said the proposal has not been finalized because several technicalities remain to be resolved.
Meanwhile, a local hospital proposed yesterday that typhoid tests be included in health examinations for foreign laborers because of the frequency of cases of the disease being brought into Taiwan by workers from overseas.
The Chiayi Hospital, affiliated with the Department of Health, made the suggestion after providing treatment to one of the latest cases — an Indonesian woman working in Taiwan as a domestic helper.
The patient disclosed that she had been infected with typhoid before arriving in Taiwan and that to secure her chances of being employed here, had used injected medication to reduce her symptoms, physician Lin Kuan-chun (林冠群) said.
Lin said failure to include typhoid tests in health examinations for foreign laborers has left a loophole in the country’s disease prevention and control efforts.
Typhoid symptoms include sustained fever, headache, loss of appetite, depressed heart rate, rash, cough, constipation or diarrhea, he said.
The hospital’s infection control division said typhoid has a fatality rate of 10 percent and is a notifiable disease in Taiwan.
Most typhoid cases diagnosed in Taiwan are imported, with the number of cases rising in recent years as the number of laborers from developing countries increases, the hospital said.
Statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control show that of the total of 33 typhoid fever cases recorded in 2008, 20 were imported.
In the first seven months of last year, the number of imported cases totaled 40, the data showed.
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