Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Pbdragonwang/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
THE MINISTRY OF LABOR has halted a plan that would have opened up six new categories of work to foreign students who have graduated from university in Taiwan. These new categories are in nursing, driving buses, cargo inventory, cargo vehicle driving, safety personnel for buses, and inventory management.
It is unsurprising that the Ministry of Labor would drop the plan after pushback. The Taiwanese public has proven sensitive due to the perception that jobs will go to foreigners, rather than Taiwanese.
In recent times, too, one notes pushback by the public against the Ministry of Labor’s plans to allow Indians to become the fifth major migrant worker group in Taiwan. Backlash from the public against Indians being allowed to work in Taiwan in blue-collar professions was often racist in nature, claiming that Indians would sexually harass or assault Taiwanese women.
The apparent disconnect between these six new categories of employment and the kinds of jobs that foreign students who have graduated university in Taiwan would work is self-apparent. These are not the jobs that individuals who have just graduated from college would generally expect to be working.
At the same time, that the Ministry of Labor proposed to open up these categories of work to foreign students–many of which may be from Southeast Asia–reflects its mentality about the role of foreigners from Southeast Asia in Taiwan. That is, these are primarily blue-collar jobs, even if the Ministry of Labor termed them to be “intermediate-skilled labor”, and these are among the jobs that Taiwanese no longer want to take. Hence why the idea of allowing foreign students to take them up has come up.
At present, Taiwan is seeing an unprecedented departure of nurses in the medical industry. 1,700 nurses quit in the first six months of 2023 alone, with the burden on medical workers having increased sharply after COVID-19.
In 2023, the nurse-to-patient ratio in Taiwan was between 1:13 and 1:15. According to surveys, nurses take care of 11.55 people during day shifts, 15.55 people during shorter night shifts, and 17.88 people during longer night shifts. Some nurses at regional hospitals have reported taking care of as many as 26 patients during night shifts. Ratios of attending physicians are also problematic, in that physicians handle thirty to forty patients when they previously handled twenty to thirty patients
Nurse union representatives have pointed out that Taiwan has among the highest nurse-to-patient ratios in the world. Taiwan’s nurse-to-patient ratio is higher than the US, Australia, the UK, and Japan. The low number of applicants for nurse positions at present, then, is because of broader awareness of the long working hours and low salaries that nurses face. Nurses may make between 32,000 NT and 36,000 NT as a starting salary, which is lower than security guards or individuals in the food and beverage industry make.
This proves similar with drivers, whether bus drivers or cargo drivers. Indeed, bus drivers have seen many accidents in the past decade, due to systematic overwork.
In February last year, a Keelung bus driver was hailed as a hero for pulling the bus over before he passed out. The bus driver in question later only awoke after a ten-day coma, indicating that he was still working despite the severity of his medical conditions. Other incidents in a similar vein include in January of this year, when a driver’s life was saved because a passenger performed CPR on him after he passed out at the wheel on a freeway near Taichung, a similar incident in September 2022, in November 2021, when a group of army recruits steered a bus to safety in Hsinchu after the driver suffered a heart attack, and in January 2015, when a high schooler that had never driven before managed to steer a bus to safety after the driver fainted.
It may not be surprising that many of the fatal incidents involving bus drivers in the past decade are thought to have been due to overwork. In February 2017, it was suggested that the causes of a fatal bus accident that killed 33 people were linked to the driver being overworked. Likewise, exhaustion from overwork was thought to be the cause of death of a driver found dead in a restroom in Keelung in January 2018. Overwork may have also been a contributing factor toward the murder-suicide of a bus driver in Taoyuan in 2016 after the driver deliberately started a fire on his bus, killing all of the 26 passengers aboard.
These are the jobs that Taiwan contemplates opening up to foreign students who have graduated with degrees from Taiwanese universities, then–evidencing a view of such students as a cheap and disposable workforce to take up jobs that Taiwanese do not want to take up. Given this worldview, it may not surprise that some universities have been found to send students from foreign countries to work in factories with the claim that these are work-study programs, and that this has been a recurrent issue in Taiwan. But this continues how such students are not regarded except as a cheap labor force, rather than welcoming them in the hopes of genuinely making society more open and pluralistic.