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Serious_Fun
Joined: 28 Jun 2005
Posts: 1171
Location: terra incognita
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clark.w.griswald
Joined: 06 Dec 2004
Posts: 2056
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 Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 1:17 am Post subject: |
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Although I do not condone the way that they acted, I would certainly say good on to them for standing up for their rights.
Blue collar foreign workers in Taiwan are treated very badly in some cases. It is true that foreign construction workers in other countries are often treated badly but this is no excuse for their bad treatment.
Personally I find it offensive when some members of this board continue to suggest how we westerners have no rights in Taiwan when we clearly do. It is the foreign blue collar workers who are almost without rights, and to suggest that we foreign teachers are hard done by is surely insulting to those foreign laborers, when the fact is that we westerners are so well off here.
When foreign teachers face the need to:
a. pay huge agent fees equal to two or three months salary just to get here.
b. be prohibited from bringing family members with us, not being able to invite family members to this country to visit us, and not being able to afford to travel home to visit our families.
c. be shipped off to construction sites in isolated areas and housed in demountable buildings with eight to ten people sharing one room.
d. have to share facilities with hundreds of other people.
e. be forced to work from 6:00 in the morning to 10:00 a night six days a week.
f. face death and/or injury at work on an almost daily basis.
g. be abused and mistreated almost the whole time.
h. be forced to return home after three years no matter what.
When all of those things are forced upon foreign teachers then I will start to take Aristotles words seriously. The fact is that they are not, and therefore I do not.
The good news is that the conditions for foreign laborers are improving. I know a couple of local engineers who have foreign laborers on site, and these engineers have a healthy level of respect for their workers and treat them nicely. Lets hope that over time others will follow suit. |
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Aristotle
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 1388
Location: Taiwan
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| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 4:34 am Post subject: |
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This picture of the laborers trying to find their passports and ARC's that their employers had confiscated from them is very interesting (note that the Taipei Times mis-represented that fact).
It is the corrupt occupational government and the racist slave policies that caused this. You can only push free men so far before they will fight.
This is not the first incident of this nature and the only reason it made the papers this time is because the BBC( a non Taiwanese news agency) broke the story first.
I think we all should show our support for these people as they have done what we all feel like doing at some time or another.
Welcome to Taiwan!
A. |
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Serious_Fun
Joined: 28 Jun 2005
Posts: 1171
Location: terra incognita
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| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 6:00 am Post subject: |
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Thank you for the replies and the reference to TEFL/TESL work. Foreign teachers are not even close to being that desperate, thank God. (as far as I know!)
The racism angle comes into play all around the world...in Ireland, (where I also have citizenship), workers from Eastern Europe, Turkey, Nigeria, etc. are brought in to do work that the Irish do not want to do anymore (the world has changed)...some of these foreign workers are treated like dogs!!
It is not only a Taiwanese issue...obviously... |
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wangtesol
Joined: 24 May 2005
Posts: 280
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| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 7:44 pm Post subject: migrant worker network |
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Six years ago in Japan, the Solidarity with Migrants Japan http://www.jca.apc.org/migrant-net/ has been connecting community groups, unions and churches that deal with migrant worker issues.
We have an annual meeting every year with about 300 people attending. Most are not migrant workers themselves but rather nurses, government officials and union organizers who lobby the government.
One of our lobbying efforts is to have Japan recognize the International Convention on Migrant Workers and Their Families http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/m_mwctoc.htm |
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Aristotle
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 1388
Location: Taiwan
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| Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2005 4:54 am Post subject: |
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I have been asked to circulate the English translation
of the following petition for feed back from the
foreign labor community on Taiwan.
Please feel free to make comments and circulate to
anyone who may have interest in sponsorship.
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"We, the undersigned organizations, institutions,churches and individuals, appeal to the Director General Juan Somaviaf of the International Labour Organization to immediately take appropriate actions to investigate the cause of the most recent violent riot by ethnic, migrant workers that erupted late on Sunday August 21, 2005 by more than 1,600 migrant workers building a mass transit railway project in Kaohsiung Taiwan.
We demand that Council of Labor Affairs Chairwoman Chen Chu (闡腑) be removed and expelled from that position for her gross dereliction of her duties. Specifically to timely investigate and provide appropriate assistance to the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers currently in the Taiwan area.
We are appealing to the Director General Juan Somaviaf of the International Labour Organization to investigate the current maltreatment of migrant workers in the Taiwan area and to refer said findings to the International Court of Justice.
We call for the formation of an independent oversight institution composed of migrant workers in the Taiwan area to take positive actions to prevent further violence as well as extend free, timely, appropriate and full assistance to all distressed migrant workers.
Labor standards for migrant workers in the Taiwan area fall below the
minimum standards of basic labor rights in terms of freedom of association, the right to organize, collective bargaining, equality of
opportunity and treatment, housing, facilities for recreation, cultural expression and other standards regulating conditions across the entire spectrum of work related issues.
We seek the promotion of social justice and internationally recognized
human and labor rights for all migrants in the Taiwan area. The decision to migrate, in the same way as the decision to authorize or not to authorize migration for employment is an rational decision, based on knowledge of the conditions of work and life in the areas of employment and is needed to remedy general or sectoral labor shortages.
Provisions for the protection of migrant workers do, themselves, have
effects on the protection of the entire workforce that in protecting migrant workers against exploitation and stipulating first and foremost the principle of equality of treatment, followed by equality of opportunity and treatment with non migrant workers.
The powers that be, in the Taiwan area fail to implement instruments and fulfill their obligation to apply, without discrimination in respect of nationality, race, religion or sex, to immigrants lawfully within Taiwan area.
We demand the protection of human rights for all migrant workers and an end to state sponsored discrimination, contemporary forms of slavery, indentured servitude and forced labor in the Taiwan area.
Director General, the time to act is now. Migrants' rights are human rights!" |
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clark.w.griswald
Joined: 06 Dec 2004
Posts: 2056
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| Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2005 10:29 am Post subject: |
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Who is circulating this letter? Who is behind the letter?
No offence, but the letter is poorly written and I think it unlikely that anyone in authority would really take the letter seriously. It is just too difficult to understand.
Why don't you fix the letter Aristotle and make it more readable before you circulate it? I am sure that you would be likely to get more support if people could more easily understand what the letter was saying. |
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Chris_Crossley
Joined: 26 Jun 2004
Posts: 1797
Location: Still in the centre of Furnace City, PRC, after eight years!!!
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| Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2005 11:58 am Post subject: Register is important when composing such a letter |
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| clark.w.griswald wrote: |
No offence, but the letter is poorly written and I think it unlikely that anyone in authority would really take the letter seriously. It is just too difficult to understand.
Why don't you fix the letter Aristotle and make it more readable before you circulate it? I am sure that you would be likely to get more support if people could more easily understand what the letter was saying. |
I don't actually agree with you on this one, Clark. You mention that Aristotle ought to have made the letter "more readable". In the end, though, who is the target audience: the poorly educated workers or the much higher educated authority to whom the letter is addressed?
Usually, it is highly educated people who use this kind of linguistic register in order to be taken seriously. I presume that Chinese has a similar kind of register if the people who write such a letter want to be taken seriously.
However, since we are dealing with migrant workers on this occasion, it is a fair bet that an educated person has had to draft this letter (in the original Chinese). Had migrant workers clubbed together to write a letter to the Director-General, I doubt that it would have been (if it has not already been) taken seriously.
After all, can you imagine what would happen if this had happened in an English-speaking country? The workers would speak with dialects, but writing something in the same dialect would not be taken seriously. It would be considered unacceptable and therefore dismissed. Nor would anything written in the standard language be taken seriously if it was organised in a very sloppy fashion with all sorts of mistakes in terms of spelling, grammar and syntax. Cynics would therefore point to such an "effort" as betraying the workers' chronic lack of education and their lack of ability in being remotely able to write a letter to anybody in officialdom.
Hence, Aristotle has, in my opinion, provided a translation in the kind of register that would be appropriate if written in English to a person of similar high authority to the aforementioned director-general, albeit by someone of the same educational level as that person, not the workers who have the grievances. |
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logician
Joined: 15 Jan 2004
Posts: 70
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| Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2005 12:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Aristotle wrote: |
Please feel free to make comments and circulate to
anyone who may have interest in sponsorship.
| Quote: |
We demand that Council of Labor Affairs Chairwoman Chen Chu (??) be removed and expelled from that position for her gross dereliction of her duties. Specifically to timely investigate and provide appropriate assistance to the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers currently in the Taiwan area. |
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IMHO the second sentence would be better if it read something like the following:
Her specific dereliction was her failure to promptly investigate and provide appropriate assistance to the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers currently in the Taiwan area.
I just think the sentence fragment is unnecessary, and "promptly" sounds like better English than "timely." |
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clark.w.griswald
Joined: 06 Dec 2004
Posts: 2056
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| Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2005 2:47 pm Post subject: Re: Register is important when composing such a letter |
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| Chris_Crossley wrote: |
| Hence, Aristotle has, in my opinion, provided a translation in the kind of register that would be appropriate if written in English to a person of similar high authority to the aforementioned director-general, albeit by someone of the same educational level as that person, not the workers who have the grievances. |
Chris, you can be sure that Aristotle did not translate this document. He is a regurgitator not a creator. The person who translated this is no doubt a Thai representative, or possibly a Chinese member of an organization that seeks to represent the Thai workers.
My point in reference to Aristotle was, if he is going to be the champion of the downtrodden then rather than just regurgitate the words of others, why not actually make a difference and offer to these people the assistance of English-ifying the document. Surely that would be more useful than just cutting and pasting the document here.
Unfortunately this document is likely to be received by the person it is intended for, they will glance at it, not understand the intention of the letter, have either no time or no interest in trying to decipher it, and then throw it in the trash can.
If the people behind the letter really want to make a difference then they should really seek assistance in preparing the letter for it's target audience. They haven't done this, and in my opinion Aristotle let them down by not pointing this out to them and helping them out. It seems to me that this would have been much more valuable than the cut and paste jobs that he is so famous for. |
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Miyazaki
Joined: 12 Jul 2005
Posts: 635
Location: My Father's Yacht
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| Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2005 7:33 pm Post subject: |
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As a footnote to this topic.
I was at NTU Hospital recently and ended up talking to a young woman from the Philippines. She was in line waiting to pay the bill for her 'boss.' The older Taiwanese lady who was her boss was sitting behind us on a bench.
I asked her how they treated her. She said it was okay but that the kids were often mean to her. She said they screamed at her.
I asked her if she got to keep her passport and she said that they took away her passport.
Is that legal? Can the Taiwanese family take and keep her passport?
Anyways, I didn't talk to her for that long but it sure makes me think that there are a lot of other foreign workers here on the island that the Taiwanese don't treat so nicely compared with how we from the 'West' are treated. |
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Xenophobe
Joined: 11 Nov 2003
Posts: 163
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| Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2005 3:36 am Post subject: |
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| What is legal and what is actually practiced in Taiwan is sometimes not the same thing. Buxiban owners are not allowed by law to deduct "runaway"insurance from teachers pay, but many still do. At one time they tried to hold onto teacher's passports and ARCs, but that fortunately is a thing of the past. However, some Taiwanese continue to flout the law and abuse the rights of domestic and blue collar workers in Taiwan, mainly because most of them are ignorant of their rights. |
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clark.w.griswald
Joined: 06 Dec 2004
Posts: 2056
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| Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:04 am Post subject: |
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It is true that no one can legally withhold your passport. Anyone who tries to do this can get into trouble if you complain to your countries representative office.
Sometimes though, teachers and other foreigners here will offer their passports as surety on loans etc. There may therefore be a reason that the employer above is holding that persons passport so we should be careful not to assume that the employer is automatically doing something wrong.
Having said that, the withholding of the passports of blue collar workers is pretty widespread, and in some cases this is used against them as a kind of blackmail. |
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Aristotle
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 1388
Location: Taiwan
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| Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:10 am Post subject: |
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Double post
Last edited by Aristotle on Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:30 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Aristotle
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 1388
Location: Taiwan
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