The Migrants Empowerment Network in Taiwan (MENT) yesterday staged a rally outside the Ministry of Health and Welfare building in Taipei, petitioning to include foreign domestic workers into the ministry’s long-term care system.
Taiwan began employing foreign domestic workers in 1992, and there are more than 210,000 foreign domestic workers in Taiwan, but they have long been excluded from the government’s long-term care policy planning, Taiwan International Workers’ Association member Wang Li-ting (王俐婷) said.
When foreign domestic workers were first introduced, Taiwan did not have a public long-term care policy, so the government gave them lower salaries, she said, adding that they also had to be on a 24-hour standby and did not get enough rest.
Photo: CNA
“The system of employment by every family is like slavery, or blood and sweat long-term care service,” Wang said. “Even after long-term care programs 1.0 and 2.0 were launched, the working conditions of foreign domestic workers did not improve much.”
Families with at-home care service needs can only choose between hiring a foreign domestic worker or using the government’s long-term care 2.0 program’s services, so including the 210,000 foreign domestic workers in the long-term care system would greatly make up for the workforce shortage, and better protect their labor rights, Wang said.
The MENT urged the ministry to include foreign domestic workers in the long-term care system, abolish the designated one-on-one employment method, have long-term care facilities sign contracts with the foreign domestic workers, and allow caregivers to collaboratively provide care services to several people.
Asked for a comment, the minsitry’s Department of Long-Term Care deputy director-general Wu Hsi-wen (吳希文) said the ministry is mulling allowing foreign domestic workers who have passed language proficiency tests and care service criteria to be recruited as community or at-home care service providers.
The Employment Service Act (就業服務法) allows facilities to hire foreign caregivers, but the employers of foreign domestic workers are families and their workplace is at the families’ homes, so the attributes of their job are not the same as long-term care providers, Wu said.
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