The Control Yuan has ordered the Ministry of Labor to enforce existing legal protections for pregnant migrant workers, following an investigation into the issue by two of its members.
Control Yuan members Wang Yu-ling (王幼玲) and Wang Mei-yu (王美玉) at a news conference on Monday said that the Control Yuan had issued the ministry a directive to take corrective measures after reviewing the investigation on April 20.
Wang Yu-ling said that Taiwan removed pregnancy tests from migrant workers’ routine health checks in 2015 and implemented a law prohibiting employers from firing migrant workers for becoming pregnant.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Despite those protections, employers and brokers often pressure pregnant migrant workers to break their contracts and return home before the seventh month of their pregnancy, Wang Yu-ling said.
Employers fabricate reasons — such as saying a caregiver’s patient no longer needs assistance or that a worker did not pass a performance review — to terminate or refuse to renew the contract of a migrant worker who gets pregnant, she said.
As a result, some migrant workers avoid seeing a doctor over the course of their pregnancy and even give birth in secret because they are scared of losing their job, she added.
To illustrate the problem, the Control Yuan members cited statistics showing that 15,648 migrant workers had received a one-off maternity benefit from the government between 2018 and last year.
Of the total, 13,300 of the workers had already returned to their home nation when they received the payment, 8,010 of whom had left Taiwan after the termination of their contract, they said.
Moreover, the proportion of pregnant migrant workers who had their work contracts canceled and left Taiwan rose from about 40 percent in 2018 to 66.1 percent last year, indicating that the problem was getting worse.
During the investigation, the Control Yuan members interviewed 18 migrant workers in the industrial and social welfare sectors who had become pregnant, as well as a worker’s spouse.
Through these discussions, they heard of a range of problems they faced during pregnancy, such as being unable to adjust their workloads or get leave for health checks, Wang Yu-ling said.
Some were also pressured to dissolve their contracts, or had to give birth in worker dormitories or at a friend’s house, she said.
While the ministry’s 1955 hotline is supposed to offer migrant workers a way to report such issues, more than 60 percent of cases reported via the hotline in 2020 and last year had been closed because the individual who filed the complaint had withdrawn it or left Taiwan, she added.
Based on the investigation, the Control Yuan urged the ministry to enforce laws and guidelines to better protect pregnant migrant workers.
The ministry later on Monday said that it was working to improve the guidance it provides to migrant workers on their legal rights in Taiwan, including through its multilingual Web pages and a chatbot service on the Line messaging app, and would conduct periodic reviews of the issues raised in the report.
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