Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Littlebtc/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
THE HIGHWAY BUREAU is reportedly considering recruiting international students and students of ethnic Han descent to fill positions as bus drivers, provided they speak intermediate-level Chinese. This continues the pattern of Taiwan opening up migrant worker categories for the so-called “3D”–“dirty, dangerous, and demeaning”–jobs that Taiwanese no longer want to take up themselves.
At the same time, it is noteworthy that students are increasingly used to fill these positions. For example, this has occurred in the hospitality industry. The hospitality industry has long clamored for migrant workers to take on jobs as cleaners, in food preparation, and at front desks, seeing as Taiwanese are increasingly unwilling to take up such roles.
Given reluctance from the government to do this, with the view that this would be taking jobs away from Taiwanese workers, the hospitality industry instead turned toward “internship” programs that were de facto means of hiring blue-collar migrant workers, usually from Southeast Asia. The salaries of such workers are not termed “salaries” but as “subsidies” whose terms are negotiated between universities and factories.
This is a product of the commercialization of education in Taiwan. Taiwan saw an explosion in the number of colleges and universities from 28 in 1985 to 145 by 2005. In a time of a decreasing birth rate, there are increasingly few students to make up enrollment, forcing some schools to turn to mostly Southeast Asian students to bolster the falling student population, and needing tuition to survive. However, clearly, some schools have taken to acting as de facto migrant brokers in arranging for their employment in factories, with administrators receiving kickbacks in return for doing so.
Bus drivers are, on the whole, highly overworked and underpaid. Likewise, bus drivers face severe stress in meeting tight bus schedules. In past years, this has been a contributing factor to a number of incidents.
For example, Taiwan has seen a number of incidents involving bus drivers passing out on the job in recent years. Two pedestrians were injured in Sanchong in February 2024 after a bus plowed into a crosswalk, following a dizzy spell by the driver.
The same month, in February 2024, a Keelung bus driver was hailed as a hero for pulling his 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 condition.
The month prior, in January 2024, 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. In November 2021, a group of army recruits steered a bus to safety in Hsinchu after the driver suffered a heart attack. Likewise, in January 2015, a high schooler who had never driven before managed to steer a bus to safety after the driver fainted.
Moreover, in February 2017, it was thought that the causes of a fatal bus accident that killed 33 were linked to the driver being overworked. Likewise, exhaustion from overwork was thought to be the cause of the death of a driver found dead in a restroom in Keelung in January 2018.
The most dramatic incident, however, may have been the Taoyuan in 2016 after the driver deliberately started a fire on his bus, killing all of the 26 passengers aboard. This, too, was believed to partly be a product of the labor conditions that the bus driver faced.
It proves ironic that despite the fact that Taiwan frequently touts people-to-people connections with Southeast Asia, the employment categories Taiwan considers opening up to migrant workers are only highly exploitative ones. Such policies are likely a disaster waiting to happen, especially once there is a deadly accident involving a non-Taiwanese driver.