More than 1,400 runaway migrant workers detained

CRACKDOWN:As well as the workers, 18 illegal labor brokers and 150 people who had illegally employed foreigners have also been uncovered

6 Nov 2010 -- More than 1,400 runaway migrant workers have been detained during a crackdown over the past month in response to the deaths of illegally employed migrants at a construction site in late September, according to the Ministry of the Interior.

“As of Nov. 3, 1,414 runaway foreign workers had been rounded up since the launch of a massive crackdown on Oct. 1,” Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said. “Absconded migrant workers are encouraged to come forward and to end their days in hiding, which puts them at risk of being mistreated by employers who hire them illegally.”

The National Immigration Agency will help those who give themselves up return to their home countries quickly and safely, he said.

Over the past month, 150 people who had illegally employed foreign workers and 18 illegal labor brokers were also uncovered, Jiang said.

The latest crackdown was launched days after six illegal foreign workers were killed in an accident at a freeway construction site in Nantou County.

According to statistics compiled by the ministry, 6,558 runaway foreign workers, 649 illegal employers and 52 illegal brokers were uncovered in the first nine months of this year.

In one of the latest cases, the Coast Guard Administration’s branch office in southern Taiwan announced the arrest of an illegal immigrant from northern Vietnam in a private house in Taichung on Friday.

The Vietnamese was cited as having said that he wanted to work in Taiwan because there were few jobs in his home country and that wages were very low there.

Many of his Vietnamese compatriots had already come to Taiwan through legal or illegal channels, he said.

A coast guard official who did not want to be named said an increasing number of illegal immigrants from Vietnam had been detained in recent years. Many of them used to work in the Vietnamese military. - Staff Writer, with CNA, http://www.taipeitimes.com

Taiwanese employers threaten to stop hiring OFWs

MANILA, Philippines – Taiwanese employers are threatening to stop hiring Filipino workers next year to protest the Philippine government’s mandatory insurance regulation.

Jackson Gan, Pilipino Manpower Agencies Accredited to Taiwan (PILMAT) president, said employers from Taiwan have expressed their intention to cancel 50,000 job orders for Filipino workers in 2011.

“Taiwan principals have sent a letter of their opposition to the mandatory insurance coverage with the warning that if our government will insist on implementing the double coverage for Filipino workers to be deployed to Taiwan they will cancel all the 50,000 job orders for 2011 and just get workers from Indonesia or Vietnam,” Gan said.

He said every contract worker in Taiwan is covered by two types of insurance, one for personal and the other is group insurance. Each overseas Filipino worker (OFW) is given a personal insurance coverage worth NT$800,000 equivalent to more than P1.2 million, and at the worksite a group insurance covers all workers at the factory.

“This is definitely more superior to the insurance coverage under the law which only provides $15,000 for accidental death and $10,000 for natural death,” he said.

There are about 100,000 OFWs employed in Taiwan, most of them employed as factory workers or caregivers.

Earlier, employers and Filipino workers in Hong Kong also expressed their opposition to the mandatory insurance coverage, which the Philippine government started implementing last week.

But Philippine labor officials said they are obliged to enforce the requirement since is it provided under the newly amended Migrant Workers Act.

Labor officials further stressed that the mandatory insurance coverage would provide additional protection for OFWs. - Mayen Jaymalin, The Philippine Star, November 14, 2010

Taiwan Considers "Fugitive Slave" Law for Migrant Workers

14 Oct 2010 -- Taiwanese labor groups are outraged by a proposed law which would offer a reward to citizens who catch "runaway" migrant workers and turn them in. The legislation would be a second cousin to the Fugitive Slave Law in the 19th century U.S., which required citizens to return runaway slaves to their owners. Is Taiwan taking its legal system all the way back to the 19th century when people were property?

Taiwan's Council on Labor Affairs (CLA) has been struggling with a problem: migrant workers who travel to Taiwan on employer-specific visas keep running away from their employers. In fact, there are currently over 33,000 migrant workers in Taiwan who have gone MIA since taking a job. So what's the CLA's solution? Turn each one of its citizens into some xenophobic version of Dog the Bounty Hunter by offering cold, hard cash for the capture of a runaway worker. The pay day turns out to be roughly $160 per "fugitive" — not a fortune, but a way for someone struggling to make a living in a downed economy to get a leg up. And if people are hurt in a mob of cash-crazy vigilantes? Well, they're only migrant workers.

Of course, what the CLA or the Taiwanese government hasn't done is ask itself why migrant workers are running away in the first place. Most of them spend serious time and money getting visas to come work in Taiwan and many workers from Southeast Asian countries have families back home relying on that paycheck. Things must be pretty bad to leave a paying job and a place to live in a foreign country where you don't have immigration papers. And for some workers, things are that bad. Southeast Asian women and girls are trafficked into domestic servitude in Taiwan, often beaten and degraded by their employers. And just recently six men were killed at an unsafe work site, which probably hadn't been kept up to code because the men at the site were undocumented. But no one is proposing a law to reward citizens for spotting human trafficking, exploitation, or unsafe working conditions.

And what awaits these runaway workers when spotted by a vigilant public and turned in for reward money? Apparently, they will "be assisted with a passport and provided with the expenses for repatriation." That a really, really polite way of saying they'll be deported but the government will foot the bill for getting them the hell out. No attempt to figure out why these people have fled from their employers, no counseling or aid for trafficked people, no attempt to reform what is obviously a broken system.

The Fugitive Slave Law didn't help the U.S. two centuries ago, Taiwan, and its cousin won't help you now. Let's make sure the U.S. doesn't step back two hundred years like Taiwan threatens to by asking your state to support domestic workers' rights, many of whom are migrants. Together, we can make sure the Fugitive Slave Act stays a historical document. - Amanda Kloer, October 14, 2010, http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/taiwan_considers_fugitive_slave_law_for_migrant_workers