RIGHTS-TAIWAN: Recession Puts Squeeze on Asian Migrant Workers

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

TAIPEI, Dec 11 2001 (IPS) - Proficiency in English can be a serious disqualification for migrant workers hoping to land a contract in this manufacturing hub, which currently needs cheap, unquestioning labour to buck recessionary trends.

“Employers and brokers can more easily cheat workers who do not speak English and are less educated,” explains Father Bruno Ciceri, director of the Stella Maris International Service Centre, which helps migrant workers gain their legitimate rights in this island nation.

The surest sign that Taiwanese employers are getting what they want is the fact that the better-educated Filipinos – more well-versed in English and more assertive about their rights and working conditions — are steadily giving way to Indonesian and Thai workers who often have little knowledge of English and are less likely to voice grievances to employers.

“Compared to 107,000 Filipinos working in this country in August last year, there were only 82,000 in the same month this year — and these jobs have gone to Thais, Indonesians and Vietnamese who are less complaining,” Ciceri said.

Maria Aquino, who works part-time as a bar attendant on Sundays in Taipei’s ‘Combat Zone’ area, says she and her husband, who works in a factory, are hoping to make enough money to pay off their debts before they are edged out of the market and forced to leave Taiwan.

“We also have to support a four-year-old daughter that we left behind with my mother and haven’t seen for nearly two years,” she adds.

Says Robert Kuo, a Filipino of mixed ethnic origin who has managed to acquire Taiwanese citizenship: “Local employers are exploitative and do not like to see employees, domestic help or factory workers sitting idle and force them to do things they would not dare ask local Taiwanese to do.”

Taiwanese employers generally have a different view of it all. “Filipinos are lazy and shiftless, quicker to demand rights than work and have a tendency to run away,” says Lim Jung Tai, who runs a unit that manufactures original equipment for auto parts, outside Taipei.

Lim says he does not discriminate between one kind of worker and another, but found Indonesians more willing to work and less complaining of the food provided and the dormitory living conditions. “My concern now is that business is slack and unless I have reliable workers, I may be forced to shut down my unit.”

“With the economy slowing down and it is not only the workers who run away, but employers are running away as well abd leaving their workers stranded with unpaid wages,” explains John Wong at the Hope Workers Centre at Chungli city in the industrial area of Taoyuan.

Wong confirms a trend among employers to replace Filipinos with Indonesians and “more cooperative” nationals from other countries. “Employers are known to have workers they don’t like woken up in the small hours of the morning, forcibly driven to the airport and illegally deported,” he adds.

Ironically, what is weighing against the Filipino workers is not only better education and better awareness of their rights, but the fact that their country takes a keener interest in the welfare of its migrant workers than do competing countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

For example, the three latter countries have been slow to support a proposal to rein in, with the cooperation of the Taiwan Council of Labour Affairs (CLA), the thousands of broker agencies that operate in the sending and receiving countries and fleece migrant workers at will.

“Workers from these countries (Indonesia, Thailand Vietnam) should not be considered as cheap commodities meant to be sold out at the lowest bid, but respected as citizens who contribute to the economy of their mother countries with their sweat and sacrifices,” says an appeal released by the Catholic Migrants Advocates in Taiwan.

Recently, the CLA ordered the inclusion of food and accommodation costs within the minimum wages of both construction and factory workers, which was set in 1998 at about 466 U.S. dollars.

“We doubt that this new regulation will ultimately benefit the Taiwan economy. As a matter of fact, by making the foreign labour force cheaper, unemployment will simply be further exacerbated,” the advocates argue.

The advocates have also suggested that since the workers are now paying for their food and accommodation, they should at least have the right to decide where they would live and what they would eat.

They have also urged the CLA to implement two of the main International Labour Organisations (ILO) conventions on migrant workers — although Taiwan is signatory to neither.

Father Ciceri throws cold water on such demands. “The reality is that we are helpless in a situation where some 10,000 factories have either been closed down because of the recession or have been relocated in mainland China to take advantage of cheap, readily available labour,” he points out.

Eddy Hasmi, who helped frame the Indonesian government’s migrant-worker policy, says the bottom line is the difficult economic situation faced by the sending countries. “The fact is that workers face worse conditions at home than they do in places like Taiwan,” he explains.

The Indonesian government, he says, is now preparing to enact laws aimed at controlling recruiting agencies and bringing migrant workers under an insurance plan to ensure they got what they got what they were contracted for.

Michael Tan, an anthropologist at the University of the Philippines who is with the non-government Health Action Information Network, says sending countries have little choice but to keep sending labour because their governments actually need the foreign exchange repatriated by the workers.

“There are currently seven million Filipinos working overseas and they repatriate 6 billion dollars a year through official channels alone. The GNP would show negative growth if it were not for the remittances from overseas,” Tan says.

Tan says that although the government speaks in glowing terms of migrant workers and calls them “new heroes”, they are left to fend for themselves in a new country where they arrive already indebted.

“Many of the women who leave the Philippines have degrees in education, midwifery and nursing, but end up as domestic help with their passports confiscated by the recruiter and facing abuse and sexual exploitation,” he adds.

Tan says the real tragedy is that many women may have left children behind and are forced to limit parenting to sending in remittances. “The remittances are fine but there is a high price to pay in terms of social capital that will affect sending countries in the coming years.”

Likewise, because many overseas Filipino workers have backgrounds in key professions like education or nursing, “we are losing valuable human resources for health and other social services,” argues Tan.