The International Center for Cultural Studies at National Chiao Tung University recently held a conference on “Dialogue between Law and Society – A Seminar on Migrant Workers’ Labor Rights and Government Policies”...
The latest round of protests against the exploitative migrant labor brokerage system saw hundreds of people demonstrating outside the Indonesian, Filipino, and Vietnamese representative offices in Taipei in early November. Yet the Taiwanese Ministry of Labor responded to the protests by washing its hands of any responsibility for upholding this predatory system of labor brokerage. The Ministry of Labor's deference to the free market is consistent with the government’s goal of treating Southeast Asian migrant workers employed through the guest worker program as cheap and disciplined labor power...
Attacks against the Yilan Migrant Fishermen Union have intensified in the wake of the astonishing collapse of the Nanfang’ao Bridge earlier this month...
The ripple effects from the collapse of the Nanfang’ao Bridge are slowly but surely merging with political currents in Taiwan, redirecting their force, and fashioning social relations anew...
Despite the obvious parallels between the ongoing popular uprising in Ecuador and the evolving crisis in Hong Kong, there has been scant media attention in Taiwan to the spiraling political situation in the former...
A Facebook group “Nanfangao, a small village but full of love,” emerged in the days after the collapse of the Nanfang'ao cross-harbor bridge in early October...
A working group formed under the auspices of the Fisheries Agency has been meeting to discuss the labor rights of migrant workers employed aboard Taiwan’s distant water fleet...
On September 20th, the training ship Yu Shiun No. 2 departed Ch’ien-chen Harbor in Kaohsiung, carrying an eclectic crew of passengers, including officials with the Fisheries Agency, employees of the Overseas Fisheries Development Council of the Republic of China, and members of the Serve the People Association, the Environmental Justice Foundation, and the Yilan Migrant Fishermen Union ...
Taiwan’s Ministry of Labor hosted a forum on October 2nd to consider allowing labor brokers to charge migrant workers additional fees after completing their first three-year employment contract...
A section of the Nanfang’ao Bridge in Yilan County collapsed around 9:30 on Tuesday morning, injuring over twenty people and killing six migrant fishermen. Responses to the bridge collapse should call attention to the dehumanizing conditions faced by migrant workers and the situation faced by migrant workers in which situation wherein migrant fishermen are bound to their worksites even when not being paid...
Andi Kao is a Ph.D. candidate in International and Comparative Labor at Cornell University. He is an affiliate with the Global Asia Research Center at National Taiwan University.
