Labour – Page 2 – Taiwan Insight

‘They’d rather sit in an air-coned office than work under the scorching sun’: dirty, dangerous and difficult farm labour in rural Taiwan

6 September 2023 Adrian Chiu

Written by Isabelle Cockel. Labour migration from Southeast Asia to Taiwan has been indispensable to Taiwan’s economic development in the last three decades. Farm work is one of the most recently opened sectors for migrant labour, and migrant farm workers, regular and irregular, have become a new and crucial source of labour in rural Taiwan. How was the recruitment of farm workers justified by the Council of Agriculture (CoA, currently the Ministry of Culture), the lobbyist for opening the farm labour market, and the Ministry of Labour (MoL), the overseer of migrant labour policy, sheds light on three critical and inter-related issues.

Transformation of Women’s Status in Taiwan, 1920-2020

17 March 2023 Adrian Chiu

Written by Doris T. Chang. Among all the gains made by Taiwanese women in the past century, achieving leadership roles in the political arena is perhaps Taiwanese women’s greatest achievement. During the Japanese colonial era, women had no right to vote. However, after lifting martial law in 1987, Taiwan emerged as a vibrant democracy. Due to political parties’ commitment to nominating more qualified women candidates for elections in the late 1990s and after that, the percentage of women elected to Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan reached 42 per cent in 2020 — the highest in Asia. This is equivalent to the percentage of women legislators in most Scandinavian countries. But Taiwanese women’s achievement in the political arena would not have been possible without making significant progress in their educational attainment throughout the twentieth century.

Lessons from the Strike by Taiwan Railway Workers

19 January 2023

Written by Kuei-Chih Yang. In 2018, the Puyuma Ziqiang train derailed on Taiwan Railway, and then in 2021, the Taroko overturn accident occurred again on Taiwan Railway. Two major railway accidents happened one after another within three years. Many innocent lives were lost, and the safety management of Taiwan Railway was questioned. In March 2022, the Taiwan government proposed a draft of the “Act for Establishment of State-owned Taiwan Railway Co., Ltd.” to respond to the social demands of reforming Taiwan Railways since the accidents.

Eliminating the Criminal Source of Human Trafficking in Cambodia

12 January 2023 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Yi-hsiang Shih. Human trafficking is nothing new to the world, yet, the term certainly receives much more attention than ever in 2022 Taiwan. Taiwanese people generally do not see themselves as victims of human trafficking. However, the cases of human trafficking in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, suddenly received extensive attention in 2022. Many of the victims in these cases were characterized as young people in Taiwan under low wages and unstable jobs and whose economic life had been affected by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020. To survive, these young people are easily lured by relatives and friends or false job information and become the main target for criminal groups. They are often deceived into working at the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone (the scamming compounds) in Cambodia, eventually becoming “commodities” exploited by human trafficking groups.

Cross-border Movement of Labour between Taiwan and the Philippines: A Taiwanese NGO Worker’s Perspective

25 November 2022

Written by Yi-Yu Lai. Lennon Wong is the director of a shelter for migrant workers in Taiwan. Before joining the shelter in the early 2010s, he was already a labour activist and worked in the Chinese Federation of Labour and the First Commercial Bank Union. Although his prior work was not directly relevant to migrant workers in Taiwan, his engagement with the labour movement may have started with the issue of migrant workers from Southeast Asia. As a result, we may thus understand the cross-border movement of migrant workers between Taiwan and the Philippines through some of his observations.

The Interaction between Taiwan’s Indigenous and Migrant Workers: Lessons from Construction Industry

21 October 2022

Written by Hsuan Lo. Translated by Yi-Yu Lai. In Taiwan, a narrative concerning the opposition of migrant and Indigenous workers appears to be a continuing source of contention. In 1997, director Ming-hui Yang released a documentary, “Please Give Us a Job.” One of the film’s impressive scenes depicts an off-duty Indigenous worker sobbing uncontrollably in front of the camera while lamenting the employment difficulties caused by the introduction of migrant workers. In 2016, Chen Ying, a DPP legislator from the Puyuma Indigenous community, brought this issue back into the public eye by highlighting the impact of “illegal migrant workers” on the employment of Indigenous workers. Unfortunately, the notion that “migrant workers take jobs from Indigenous workers” has become deeply ingrained.

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