Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Neillin1202/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
A NUMBER OF major shifts in migrant worker policy are soon set to take place.
First and most prominently, migrant work policies on hiring caretakers to take care of children under the age of 12 are to be relaxed. Under the new rules, families with one child under 12 can hire migrant workers. Migrant workers hired under this policy will need to be paid at least 20,000 NT, along with 5,000 NT in security fees, each month.
Current regulations stipulate that families must have three children under the age of 6 in order to qualify for hiring a migrant caretaker. But even as elderly care has increasingly become taken up by migrant workers, who stay with families and take care of elderly family members, very few migrant workers are hired as domestic helpers who assist with taking up children. With more than 870,000 migrant workers in Taiwan, only 2,000 are hired as domestic helpers.
The move has been welcomed by some industry groups, who criticized previous laws as too strict. This includes the International Association of Family and Employers with Disabilities, which represents employers. But other groups have been critical, such as the Childcare Policy Alliance, which stated that hiring migrant workers to ease the burden on parents from childcare would likely not increase the birthrate. The Taiwan Labour Front also took the view that the move could undermine the labor conditions of the 25,000 childcare workers in Taiwan, such as babysitters and educators.
Indeed, migrant worker advocates have in the past been critical of the easing of restrictions that previously existed on hiring migrant workers to care for the elderly, which were linked to assessment of need according to the Barthel Index. Lifting the need for an assessment was criticized as simply furthering the exploitation of migrant workers in Taiwan.
But one notes that the Lai administration has more broadly sought to make it easier to hire migrant workers. Opening up new industries to migrant work, such as the hospitality industry, in food services, as cleaners, and with proposals to also open up critical care in hospitals, is probably aimed at convincing the public that the Lai administration is taking steps to address long-standing woes facing Taiwan regarding its declining birthrate and low fertility rate. The announcement of the shift in hiring policy for domestic migrant workers took place around the same time as the announcement of the expansion of elderly care programs, to the tune of 6.25 billion NT. The Lai administration has also moved to regulate how student internships have become de facto ways for hiring migrant workers, a policy that has been criticized by the KMT in that students from Southeast Asia end up working in low-paying jobs in Taiwan, rather than genuinely coming for their education.
Even so, migrant workers remain excluded from the labor rights that Taiwanese workers have. Earlier this month, migrant worker advocates demonstrated against plans for blue-collar migrant workers who have lived in Taiwan for more than ten years to be included in an older pension system that is being phased out. For migrant workers to qualify for pensions, they would need to work for more than ten years under the same employer, meaning that many would not qualify for pensions. The older pension system has stricter eligibility requirements than the newer one, and migrant worker advocates have warned that employers may terminate employees shortly before they reach the ten-year deadline in order to avoid paying their pensions.
Yet this more broadly continues the pattern by which measures taken by the government to supposedly benefit migrant workers and provide for their long-term residency in Taiwan have generally strengthened the power that employers already have over migrant workers. For example, while migrant workers have historically been limited to staying at most fourteen years in Taiwan, changes passed in 2022 to allow migrant workers to qualify for “intermediate-skilled labor” status would let them stay longer, but give the power to designate migrant workers as “intermediate-skilled labor” to employers, strengthening the power of employers over migrants. Steps to genuinely include migrant workers in society continue to be performative at best.