Taipei The Organizers’ Forum delegation was on a deep dive to understand the situations faced by migrant workers in Taiwan with meetings early and late during one day with Jing Ru Wu and her colleagues at the Taiwan International Workers Association (TIWA) and Lennon Ying-Da Wang of Service the People Association (SPA), its Director of Policies on Migrant Workers. In brief, migrant workers total about 800,000 with 200,000 of those in the long-term care industry alone. As the population in Taiwan ages and the birthrate falls, as it is doing in all higher-income and industrialized countries, migrant workers become more critical to life and the economy in the country. Unfortunately, their significance has not aligned with any new rights and privileges. In short, it’s a maze, and TIWA and SPA walked us through it.
Different from most industrialized countries, this is not a crisis of undocumented migrants. As an island country, entry is restricted, so most blue-collar migrants come with contracts arranged by intermediary brokers, which is a huge and expensive issue itself. The contracts are relatively short at three-years, and until recently a worker had to leave Taiwan and then pay again to come back and renew the contract. That has changed, but the often-predatory broker system has not been altered. Migrants are on a quota and are only accepted from the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, primarily, though there is discussion about adding India to the list. Migrants are frequently housed in dormitories or apartments provided by the employers. Blue-collar migrants are usually paid less than the minimum wage in Taiwan and restricted from leaving their employers, although “runaway” workers are not uncommon. There is no discernible path to citizenship. Most of the care workers live in the residents of their clients, which add more limits. Few of these restrictions apply to white-collar migrants from soup to nuts.
TIWA runs one shelter for migrants, and SGA runs several. These organizations often mediate labor disputes as well as advocating for changes in the terms and conditions of work for migrants. We asked a lot of questions about organizing and unionizing migrants. There have been some efforts, and TIWA is trying to register one union in a specific area of migrant labor. There has also been work among fishermen. One interesting issue is winning access to wi-fi for those workers. We also heard from the Taiwan Association for Human Rights which has been campaigning on this issue. Of the 1000 registered boats, 300 of them have wi-fi, but only 80 of those give the workers any access. Without it they can’t communicate with their family or access services for months at sea.
TIWA has been particularly active in campaigning for rules and restrictions on brokers, arguing that often they are putting migrant workers in situations akin to slavery and are basically human traffickers. In trying to get ahead of the prospects of Indian workers being admitted, they argue preemptively that these arrangements for workers would be better handled if they were done country-to-country, eliminating the middlemen.
Language barriers and physical isolation of the workers make organization outside the shelters very difficult. The limited rights under labor law are also a hindrance. There have been wildcat strikes from time to time among groups of migrants here and there, but nothing sufficient to sustain organization.
TIWA receives much of its support in this work from the Taiwan equivalent of the United Way, which is having its own problem with declining donations. SGA is in a better financial situation because it contracts with governmental agencies for housing migrants, but worries that depending so much on governmental sources, while advocating for changes for migrants, is also precarious.
This is hard, thankless, and critical work. We were glad to learn more about it, but were humble in joining with our new comrades as they faced difficult problems with no clear or easy answers in the current political and resource environment here or globally.