Written by Renee Te-Jung Chen. This article looks beyond the numbers of Taiwan’s Small-Amount Remittance Services for Foreign Migrant Workers from a gender perspective. It argues that the milestone of becoming the primary remittance channel obscures the gendered patterns in adopting the new platform. It suggests that the collection of sex-aggregated data is necessary.
Written by Isabelle Cockel. This article reviews the case of Nguyen Quoc Phi, an undocumented Vietnamese worker who lost his life to a police constable’s gunshots on 31st August 2017. It reveals the online ethnic trolling of migrant workers and the discrimination they face institutionally.
Written by Hang-Tang Chen; translated by Yu-Chen Chuang. Taiwan needs to refine its migrant worker policies to focus not only on labour contributions but also on the well-being and dignity of the workers. Personal stories of migrant workers in this article reveal the necessity for comprehensive policies that address the physical and mental health needs, acknowledging the humanity behind the workforce.
Written by Bonny Ling. A few months before the presidential elections, I gave a talk in Taipei on the responsible recruitment of migrant workers, where they do not bear the cost of their job recruitment and begin their employment saddled by debt. Afterwards, a participant came up to ask me which presidential candidate I thought would stand the best chance to reform Taiwan’s labour recruitment system towards the Employers Pays Principle, where the costs of recruitment are borne by the employers. I was asked this from time to time in the runup to the January 2024 elections, so this alone did not surprise me. What did was his next statement: “And I will vote for them.” I studied his face to see if he was serious. Not sure. Had I just met my first single-issue voter on migration in Taiwan? Are there more?
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.
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.
