The Fisheries Agency on Sunday began the first phase of examinations to recruit 79 personnel to conduct an increased number of inspections to improve the labor conditions of migrant crew employed on Taiwanese-owned distant-water fishing (DWF) vessels.
A total of 189 examinees attended written exams in Taipei and Kaohsiung to qualify to work in a variety of positions, including as investigators of labor rights violations, catch inspectors and translators, the agency said in a statement.
An oral exam is to be held on Aug. 20, with the names of the successful applicants to be released on Sept. 2, it said.
The recruits “will become a new force for safeguarding fishery rights in the country, improving the capacity of Taiwan’s fishery management, and promoting the sustainable development of the industry,” agency Acting Director-General Chang Chih-sheng (張致盛) said.
The hiring is part of a broader action plan the agency has adopted to improve working conditions for migrant fishers on Taiwan’s DWF fleets.
Taiwan has one of the world’s largest DWF fleets. Rights groups such as Greenpeace and Taiwanese migrants’ organizations have long highlighted human rights contraventions on Taiwan-owned vessels, including debt-bondage contract arrangements, withheld wages, poor working and living conditions, and physical abuse.
The government has been under increased pressure to remedy these problems after numerous cases were reported.
Yilan Migrant Fishermen Union secretary-general Allison Lee (李麗華) said she sees problems in the way the new personnel are being recruited, which she says might favor Taiwanese DWF vessel owners during inspections.
“Many of the examinees are from organizations founded or organized by Taiwanese vessel owners. Since the recruits also worked for vessel owners, it is likely they might not conduct proper labor checks,” Lee said.
“It is like being a sports competitor while also being the referee during a match,” she added.
Lee said that the new inspectors are contract workers, not civil servants.
The new inspectors and translators are likely to begin work by the end of September, said Chiu Yi-hsien (邱宜賢), section chief at the agency’s Deep Sea Fisheries Division.
The are to be concentrated in the DWF ports of Nanfangao (南方澳) in Yilan, Cianjhen (前鎮) in Kaohsiung and Donggang (東港) in Pingtung.
There are about 21,000 migrant fishers employed on Taiwanese DWF fleets, including 13,000 Indonesians and 6,300 Filipinos, agency officials said.
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
PUBLIC POLL: More than half believe Chinese drills would make Taiwanese less willing to unify with China, while 36 percent said an invasion was highly unlikely Half of Taiwanese support independence, according to the results of a poll released yesterday by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, which also found that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) support rating fell by 7 percentage points. Fifty percent of respondents supported independence, 25.7 percent supported maintaining the “status quo” and 11.8 percent supported unification, while 12.1 percent had no opinion, did not know or refused to answer, the foundation said. Support for independence is the new mainstream opinion, regardless of which party is in power, foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆) said. Insinuations that Taiwan wants to maintain the “status quo” are a fabrication that
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old