Bonny Lingby Bonny Ling
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Photo Credit: Lennon Ying-Dah Wong/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
The following article is part of a special joint issue between New Bloom and Taiwan Insight on the 2024 elections.
A FEW MONTHS before the presidential elections, I gave a talk in Taipei on the responsible recruitment of migrant workers, where they do not bear the cost of their job recruitment and begin their employment saddled by debt. Afterwards, a participant came up to ask me which presidential candidate I thought would stand the best chance to reform Taiwan’s labour recruitment system towards the Employers Pays Principle, where the costs of recruitment are borne by the employers.
I was asked this from time to time in the runup to the January 2024 elections, so this alone did not surprise me. What did was his next statement: “And I will vote for them.” I studied his face to see if he was serious. Not sure. Had I just met my first single-issue voter on migration in Taiwan? Are there more?
There are some 754,130 registered migrant workers in Taiwan as of November 2023, and an estimated 82,000 are undocumented. Together, this would be roughly around 3.6 per cent of the 23 million residents living in Taiwan. Yet, all three presidential candidates – Lai, Hou, and Ko – had substantively few to deliver on the genuine reforms needed on the issue of labour migration, even though all had broadly agreed that Taiwan needs more migrant workers.
India-Taiwan Labor Migration
IN THE RUN-UP to the elections, the most attention given to the issue of labour migration was the proposed Taiwan-India migration corridor, as Taiwan’s fifth significant country of origin for migrant workers. First reported domestically in September 2023, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was delayed and brought public protests and open discrimination against South Asians.
It is not clear when the Taiwan-India MOU will be formalised and announced. Nonetheless, the proposal signifies the irony that, while all parties acknowledged that Taiwan needs more foreign labour, none has shown the courage to change the fundaments of a broken recruitment system. By all public accounts, there is no indication of how the India-Taiwan migration would be done differently from existing migration arrangements with Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
Numerous studies and reports have already documented the high recruitment fees and costs that Indian migrant workers pay for their employment abroad, leading to serious labour abuses. These can include debt bondage and the withholding of passports or residence permits until the sum owed is fully repaid. We also heard this from the testimonies of Indian migrant construction workers for the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar.
Monthly Service Fees: Legal But Unjust
ALL OVER THE world, migrant workers often bear high recruitment fees and related costs, contributing to risks of debt bondage and forced labour in their employment. On top of this, in a system that is locally unique, Taiwan allows for the legal collection of monthly service charges from migrant workers. This is effectively a human resource management service that should be collected from the employers as a standard business operating cost.
Migrant workers pay these fees on a recurring monthly basis. In law, these fees are expenses that are “required for undertaking employment services matters…and transportation costs for receiving and sending off foreign person(s),” according to Article 6 in the Standards for Fee-charging Items and Amounts of the Private Employment Services Institution 《私立就業服務機構收費項目及金額標準》.
In the first year, the monthly service fee that migrant workers pay is NT$ 1,800, NT$ 1,700 for the second year, and then NT$ 1,500 per month thereafter (about US$ 48-58). In contrast, the service fees employers pay the labour brokers are done annually and capped at NT$2,000 (about US$ 65) under the same regulation, Article 3(2).
Elections are over for now. And there is no easy way to say this – Taiwan needs to be on the right side of history on labour migration. There is no scenario where these fees can be justified as a legitimate migrant worker-borne cost under international standards or under the increasing number of corporate statements that explicitly prohibit the charging of all recruitment fees and related costs from the workers. Suppliers that do so risk severing business relationships.
False Zero-Sum Narratives
IN 2020, when Indonesia proposed to shift recruitment fees and related costs (a scope that is broader than the monthly service fees alone) from Indonesian migrant domestic workers and fishers, public protests flared in Taiwan. These protests were mainly organised by families who heavily rely on migrant workers for the domestic care of their elderly or disabled family members.
The government was wrong then to not actively step in to correct this implicit narrative that the human rights of older persons and persons with disabilities would be harmed by the assertion of migrant rights. It was a missed opportunity to dismiss the Indonesian proposal and not explore alternative proposals that could mitigate the transitional economic impact for employers.
Instead, the Ministry of Labor said, the proposal was “a position that Taiwan cannot accept” 「我們不能接受」. It then asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to explore and formalise new labour migration agreements with additional countries of origin, as if the push for responsible recruitment is a zero-sum narrative where one marginalised group gains while others lose.
The Indonesian proposal has since ebbed, whilst the reality remains that migrant-borne recruitment fees are often equal to about the first ten months of salary for Indonesian migrant workers. Even now, four years later and post-election, it is difficult not to view the proposed India-Taiwan labour migration against these recent efforts in Indonesia to push for better protection of their workers abroad.
We need genuine reforms on labour migration and Taiwan. All the positions related to migration across the three presidential tickets do not go to the root causes of a flawed labour migration system. None mentioned the risks of debt bondage in migrant recruitment into Taiwan, even while all agreed that Taiwan needs more foreign labour and better migrant integration as Taiwan faces its incoming super-aged reality.
New Economic Reality
THROUGHOUT PAST YEARS of delivering talks both in Taiwan and internationally on responsible recruitment, I’ve noticed a tangible change: this is the new economic reality. For Taiwanese suppliers to maintain their competitiveness in the global marketplace, they must acknowledge that the current expectations for environmental and human rights protections have significantly increased compared to the era when Taiwan first began its rapid industrialisation journey decades ago.
Global businesses are now operating with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) to set out their responsibility to respect human rights. Their responsibilities are not limited to the activities of their headquarters or subsidiaries. Rather, this responsibility is embedded throughout their value chains worldwide.
The human rights yardstick is not how suppliers fare under flawed domestic law or in relative comparison with others but under international standards, especially related to fundamental labour principles and rights at work. These are crucial considerations for Taiwanese suppliers to secure contracts with reputable, like-minded global partners that aim to operate on the basis of the UNGPs.
Post-Election Challenge
TAIWAN NEEDS TO revise the law. Everywhere else that I can think of – and I want to be wrong on this, so Taiwan is not the odd data point against global practices – these monthly service fees are paid by the employers as a human resource management cost and not shifted to the migrant workers. Additional fees and policies also play a role in elevating the risk of exploitation and forced labour among migrants. However, the legal foundation for these monthly service fees, which are borne by the migrant workers, is clearly stated in the law, impossible to unsee.
Yet, this system has become so normalised over the 32 years of Taiwan’s Employment Service Act that questioning it is deemed a pipe dream. But it is not a dream. If the elections have shown anything, it is that Taiwan is capable of the most extraordinary evolution: that of the simplicity of voting orderly, transparently and peacefully, unthinkable even a generation ago that grew up not speaking of politics.
If our whole heart is in the reform for a different migration reality that truly realises the ties of people-to-people ties, we can begin to move away from election proposals that do not address the root causes of a flawed recruitment system. We can courageously look at transitional measures of subsidies to help small- and medium enterprises that dominate the Taiwanese economy and individual families that employ migrant domestic workers to meet these costs.
Post-election, the focus is now on Taiwan’s divided legislature and its potential to stymie any reform agenda. All of that is true. Still, I cannot help but hope for and work towards a different outcome, one where policymakers can tap into the fact that labour migration is a cross-party issue that has influenced every aspect of Taiwanese life.
Hurry, Hurry
FOR THREE DECADES now and counting, migrant workers have cared for our elderly, harvested our crops, and built products that we proudly export as Made in Taiwan. We have second-generation immigrants shaping a new version of what it means to be Taiwanese, with their language skills and understanding of Southeast Asia giving Taiwan the economic advantage it needs to rapidly grow regional investments.
Taiwan is at a crucial junction on migration and many other issues that fellow contributors have pointed out in this Special Issue. A divided legislature where no party has a majority makes it very difficult to push for reforms. Yet, I cannot help but wonder whether now is a moment, special in time, to build true ground-swelling and cross-party consensus on labour migration reforms.
Back in 2021, I gave a talk at New Bloom on ethical supply chains and urged Taiwan to “Hurry, Hurry, Hurry.” There was no time to waste then and even less time now to be on the right side of history.