Aristotle
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 1388
Location: Taiwan
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 Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 5:00 am Post subject: |
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Editorial:
Exploiting Taiwan's underclass
Taipei Times
Monday, Aug 09, 2004
The Council of Labor Affairs recently announced that it was scrapping a
proposed "financial management system" under which foreign laborers
would be compelled to open personal accounts at selected banks. That
at least is the part of the plan that made the news -- there is more to it.
Thank heaven for that; let us be frank: Taiwan's record in dealing with
foreign laborers is so abysmal that whenever some new government
ordinance concerning them is proposed, cynicism and the most rigorous
questioning concerning the motives behind it are entirely justified.
Foreign laborers are Taiwan's great underclass, outrageously treated
and utterly defenseless. Being without votes, and therefore of no political
value, nobody anywhere in the political spectrum gives a damn about
them. If anything, politicians try to make these unfortunates' lives even
worse by pandering to the interests of their employers -- those interests
revolving around getting more work for less pay and fewer fringe benefits.
In the latest case, suspicions were aroused by the different justifications
given for the new plan. First we were told that it was intended to regulate
outward financial flows. Then we were told that it was to discourage
financial exploitation by employment agencies or employers. Well, which
is it?
Probably not the first, if only because the figure the CLA gave for these
currency-threatening overseas remittances was NT$72 billion a year.
That's right, US$2.1 billion, which represents less than a week's trading
on the local forex market, or less than a tenth of the annual interest on
Taiwan's foreign currency reserves.
As to the second explanation, let us first note that no groups
representing foreign workers asked for the council's proposed system.
They have asked for a system which makes them less able to be
pitilessly exploited by employers and brokers. But the CLA's proposals
are not such a system. In fact -- this will hardly come as a surprise -- they
would actually aid such exploitation, by allowing exorbitant brokers' fees
to be classed as loans, repayments for which would be compulsorily
deducted from workers' pay.
On top of this, the new measure would have made a significant change
in the fringe benefits that overseas contract workers enjoyed. Currently,
medical, funeral and repatriation costs are the expense of employers.
The new scheme would have made the workers themselves liable for a
significant burden of this, to be taken out of a proposed NT$3,000 per
worker per month compulsory savings.
As usual, the labor council took the side of the employers in trying to get
more for less. Basically the council's strategy is to bail out employers by
making foreign laborers cheaper to hire. This is detrimental not only to
the workers themselves, but also to local workers, by depressing salary
levels, and the economy as a whole, by trying to support a low-cost
manufacturing economic model that has been obsolete for a decade or
more.
That the CLA has now dropped this plan -- at least for the time being -- is
the result of protests by local labor groups. We congratulate them on
their success.
The irony is that there are very simple measures the council might pass
which would vastly improve the lot of foreign workers. For example, it
would be simple enough to outlaw the notorious "second contracts"
which many workers have to sign and which, they find when they arrive in
Taiwan, have deprived them of most of their rights under Taiwan's labor
protection laws. It would also improve the lot of foreign workers if CLA
approval, following a hearing, were needed before repatriation could take
place -- the possibility of being sent home on an employer's whim is a
constant threat. The very fact that the CLA eschews such simple
measures tells us where its real interests lie -- and those aren't with the
workers.
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