Factories, farms and homes in Taiwan will soon play host to migrant workers from a new country: India. Taiwan’s labor ministry announced on February 16 it had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with India to bring migrant workers from India into Taiwan to work in industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and care work. These are all areas the ministry claimed are struggling to find enough workers locally due to Taiwan’s low birthrate and shrinking labor force, as Taiwan is set to become a “super-aged” society later this year.
It’s the latest addition to a decades-long policy begun in 1992, which saw Taiwanese authorities invite migrant workers from Southeast Asia to work in industries that have come to earn the infamous label of “3D” (difficult, dirty, and dangerous). Many migrant worker advocates argue that in several industries there’s also an implied fourth “D”: the risk of death. To date, Taiwan hosts more than 750,000 migrant workers, the vast majority of them coming from Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand.
Days after Taiwan and India finally signed the MOU, Taiwan’s labor minister Hsu Ming-chun (許銘春) said in a talk show interview that Taiwan would prioritize hiring workers from India’s northeast, because their “skin color and eating habits” were similar to those of Taiwanese people and they are “mostly Christians.” Journalists, activists and lawmakers including Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Kuan-ting (陳冠廷) and several Indian news outlets condemned Hsu’s comments, with many pointing out they were racist and discriminatory. Hsu apologized days later, saying her “inaccurate” comments caused misunderstandings between Taiwan and India. After details of the deal first became public last September, a wave of racist comments by internet users claimed that Indian workers would make Taiwan unsafe and vulnerable to sexual assault. At that time, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) claimed many of the comments “were actually created, generated from the other side of the Taiwan Strait to create division or distrust between Taiwan and India.”
For now, the details of the MOU are largely confidential. Taiwan and India will keep negotiating before sending the final agreement to Taiwan’s executive and legislative yuans for review and approval. Ministry of Labor spokesperson Lee Jen-lung (李仁龍) said in an interview that many of the details of the deal will be decided in working groups set up by the Indian and Taiwanese governments. After the deal is finalized, a small group of Indian workers will arrive in Taiwan as part of a pilot program before the recruitment expands further. Lee said Taiwan and India plan to use a similar mix of methods to recruit Indian workers as with other countries.
As the negotiation process continues, many migrant labor rights advocates have voiced their concern over its lack of transparency, emphasizing the need for the final deal between India and Taiwan to address exploitative policies that migrant worker communities here in Taiwan are already too familiar with. One of the greatest hurdles they face is the private broker system, which matches migrants to employers. The steep fees associated with these brokers often plunge migrants into cycles of debt before they even reach Taiwan.
Domestic worker and union leader Gilda Banugan has seen many issues with private brokers firsthand, and noted that domestic workers aren’t even covered by Taiwan’s Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), an issue which will apply to Indians who do the same kind of care work.
“After we arrive here, the brokers will have us sign documents in Chinese. Many of us don’t understand that this is a contract ‘addendum’ which modifies the terms of the agreement we signed back in the Philippines.” The new contracts often result in fewer days off, and higher fees for migrants, and Banugan said Philippine migrants aren’t given a meaningful orientation to warn them of moves like these.
Banugan said she’s often tried to work with the Philippine representative office in Taiwan on labor disputes, and “they always tell the migrant to simply accept what the employer is offering, even in cases where a migrant is injured on the job … and the employer offers them NT$100,000 when they should be offering NT$500,000.” She hopes the Indian government will focus more on the needs of its migrant workers.
“The system of having migrant workers pay for their recruitment fees and related costs abroad is a global problem that has already existed for decades,” said Bonny Ling, executive director of the U.K.-based NGO Work Better Innovations. “We are in the midst of changing this system because it is a system that is inherently discriminatory and makes no business sense, either. The International Labour Organisation in 2019 came out with definitive guidelines on what is meant by fair recruitment, and there are a lot of efforts going into making this vision a reality.”
At a rally outside the Legislative Yuan last Thursday, members of several migrant NGOs called for legislators to carefully scrutinize the India-Taiwan labor deal, allow civil society to provide input, and for them to make sure that the deal Taiwan eventually negotiates keeps Indian workers safe from private broker fees.
“We see the labor deal as a unique opportunity for Taiwan and India to negotiate a fairer migration deal than Taiwan has negotiated with other nations in the past,” researcher Chen Hsiu-Lien (陳秀蓮) at the Taiwan International Workers’ Association told me following the rally. The DPP retained the presidency but lost control of the legislature in Taiwan’s most recent January elections. No party has a clear majority, and Chen sees this as an opportunity for greater accountability on the India-Taiwan deal when the legislature reviews it.
Chen’s organization, TIWA, is pushing for Taiwan to set up a direct government-to-government hiring system for migrants which would eliminate the need for private brokers, saving Indian migrants the pain of excessive broker fees. Chen says Taiwan wouldn’t be the first country to implement a system like this. South Korea has already alleviated broker fees through a government-to-government hiring system called EPS, or the Employment Permit System.
“In Korea, if you’re an employer who wants to hire a migrant worker, you just have to go to the government department for migrant workers, give them the right documents, and they’ll take care of the rest … it’s a chance for Taiwan to finally address the exploitative private broker system that’s existed for 33 years,” Chen said.
Ling believes that rather than relying on a single political party or candidate to implement these rules, a “cross-party consensus” is necessary for Taiwan to make progress on human and labor rights for migrant workers, including the future Indian arrivals. Although no major party made serious commitments to migrant rights in the last election, Ling points to a changing international scrutiny on forced labor and human rights, arguing “there’s a changing economic reality that Taiwanese companies need to be mindful of. If buyers go with international standards then there’s a risk Taiwanese companies won’t get business.”
One example of this kind of leverage is when the U.S. Department of Labor added Taiwan-caught fish to its “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor” in both 2020 and 2022 after several international NGOs documented labor rights abuses in the Taiwanese fishing industry, which employs many Southeast Asian migrant workers. Taiwan’s fisheries agency responded by raising migrant fishers’ monthly minimum wage from $450 to $550 USD, upping their life insurance coverage from 1 million to 1.5 million New Taiwan dollars, and opening a hotline allowing migrant fishers to file labor complaints.
Lennon Wong (汪英達), director of migrant worker policies for the Serve the People Association in Taoyuan, an NGO which offers direct services to migrant workers including assisting them in labor disputes, has also noticed Taiwan facing pressure in recent years from the four main countries providing its migrant workforce to improve their wages and working conditions. He cited Indonesia and the Philippines as examples of countries that responded to demands from their own migrant workers and labor unions to request higher minimum wages for their migrant workers in Taiwan.
“Usually when a demand like that comes from the sending countries, Taiwan will try not to recognize it,” Wong said.
Wong has also seen that the Taiwanese government often fails to provide adequate translation services for migrants, and worries that Indian workers will fall into the same trap.
According to Wong, the Taiwanese authorities “have a stereotype that workers from the Philippines all speak English, so most of the translation services they offer [Philippine workers] are in English.” Wong noted that a few government translators are available who speak Tagalog, but far below what he notices is required.
Wong has seen examples of Filipino workers being underserved as a result of this lack of adequate services. He says it can be a significant issue when, for example, a migrant worker contacts government authorities to complain about mistreatment and can’t communicate with them, or when a migrant is injured and needs to go to the hospital, and can’t communicate with the medical staff. He’s aware of cases in which the employer or broker takes the migrant to the hospital to communicate for them, and lies about how the migrant got injured to avoid responsibility.
“I know that India is a very huge, diverse country and I worry that the Taiwan government also assumes that everyone who would come from India would only need translation services in English,” Wong said. The labor ministry has said it will first bring a limited number of Indian workers to Taiwan, screening them for English ability. Based on his experience serving Filipino migrants, Wong remains skeptical, noting that Indians with higher English-language ability would likely tend not to be working in industries that Taiwan is recruiting migrant workers for.
But Wong has seen examples where demands from host countries, coupled with other actions such as a strike by Indonesian coastal fishers, have led to wage increases. He noted that the monthly minimum wage for Philippine and Indonesian migrant workers in Taiwan has risen as a result of these efforts.
Taiwan’s rapidly aging neighbors in East Asia, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong, are all driving up demand for migrant workers, which Wong also argues is slowly giving migrants greater bargaining power.
Wong sees recruiting migrant workers from India as a means of weakening the leveraging power of the existing migrant labor communities. “The real purpose is to make the supply of migrants more stable, regardless of the demands from the migrant-sending countries,” Wong said. By increasing the supply of migrants, Wong argues, Taiwan hopes to deflate the bargaining power of migrants.
Ling has a similar analysis. In an article for the University of Nottingham’s magazine Taiwan Insight, she noted that, in 2020, Indonesia requested that Taiwan modify the terms of its labor agreement to shift recruitment fees and related costs from Indonesian workers onto their employers — a proposal Wong’s organization broadly supports for all migrant workers in line with the International Labour Organization’s guidelines, in lieu of an established direct government-to-government hiring system.
Public protests flared up in Taiwan, mostly driven by families of elderly or disabled people worried that they would have to pay a higher share of costs for bringing Indonesian domestic workers to care for their relatives. Rather than find a compromise, Taiwan’s labor ministry said Indonesia’s request was “a position that Taiwan cannot accept” and directly asked Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to explore labor deals with new countries of origin. “Even now, four years later and post-election, it is difficult not to view the proposed India-Taiwan labor migration as against these recent efforts in Indonesia to push for better protection of their workers abroad,” Ling wrote in the article.
Although the MOU may be designed to pit workers against each other in order to drive wages down, it could also be seen as an opportunity for local and migrant workers to develop a deeper relationship of solidarity in which both communities empower each other to achieve better standards of living.
In the past few months of attending migrant worker protests, I noticed hopeful examples like Prasad Chaminda, who arrived in Korea twenty years ago from Sri Lanka. I first met him at a rally of hundreds of migrant workers in downtown Taipei on December 10, which sought to abolish the private broker system, and later met him at a migrant labor rights conference where he was a speaker. Chaminda was visiting Taiwan as part of a delegation from his Korean union, the Seongseo Industrial Complex Trade Union, where he now serves as vice chairperson, to better understand labor and migration in Taiwan.
A few months after he graduated high school, Chaminda chose to work in Korea after seeing a newspaper advertisement because he wanted to go to a snowy country. Although he originally planned to just save money for three years and go back, he ended up staying for two decades, getting married and helping form a union. He now serves as the vice chairperson of a union that serves thousands of Korean and migrant workers at the roughly 2,500 small businesses at a factory complex in Daegu, an industrial urban region in Korea’s southeast.
“The strength of the labor movement in general depends on how much power and unity we have between migrants and local workers,” Chaminda said at the conference. Before Korea adopted its EPS system in 2004, Chaminda said it too relied on a private broker system, and migrant workers often weren’t referred to legally as workers, but as “trainees.”
“I too came to Korea as a ‘trainee,’” Chaminda said. “‘Trainees’ had to pay heavy broker fees, and spend their whole first year paying back these fees. Many workers who couldn’t pay the fees or had other problems ran away and became undocumented. Eventually, along with undocumented workers, we fought and achieved abolition of the broker system, and a minimum wage, in creating the EPS.”
Chaminda, in fluent Korean, spoke of his own work organizing Korean workers alongside migrants, and the steady work of showing Korean workers how their struggles are tied to those of migrants, as opposed to the zero-sum rhetoric they often hear of migrants taking away their jobs or lowering their wages. “Korean workers’ unionization rate is 14 percent. But that’s only 0.3 percent for migrants. Capitalists take advantage of that difference,” he said.
As I listened to Chaminda, I was struck by the missing link in migrant rights issues in Taiwan — the buy-in of local Taiwanese workers and their labor unions. Apart from committing to a few shared campaigns, Taiwanese labor unions haven’t directly engaged migrant workers much. Taiwanese workers face some of the lowest wages in East Asia, but Lennon Wong pointed out to me that, “Taiwanese unions are often very concerned with the year-end bonuses of their own workers. They rarely try to recruit migrant workers in the same factories as their Taiwanese members.” Wong explained that, at least for the short term, his organization is more focused on helping migrant workers form their own unions in Taiwan, and then eventually affiliate those unions to umbrella organizations across Asia and the world to put international pressure on Taiwan’s labor laws and employers.
Meeting Chaminda, a Sri Lankan immigrant to Korea, left me with hope that when fellow South Asian migrants arrive in Taiwan, Taiwan’s labor movement could see someone like Chaminda begin to build shared consciousness between Taiwanese and migrant workers, and achieve concrete results for workers of all nationalities in Taiwan.
In my interviews with Southeast Asian workers, I could easily imagine future Indian workers stuck in the same difficult situations that they described to me. I could envision Indians struggling with sexual harassment or assault in Taiwanese homes, struggling to repay broker fees while sending the rest of their savings home to their families, and failing to explain labor disputes to Taiwanese government officials who can’t understand their local languages. Perhaps it’s only fitting that the most prominent symbol of hope that stood out to me was also a South Asian worker — a Sri Lankan migrant to Korea who represented the promise of Indians and other working people in Taiwan forging a common struggle, and working towards concrete improvements for everyone who works for a living, no matter their “skin color or diet.”
Anna Luy Tan contributed reporting to this story.
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