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Article

24 Feb 2021

Author:
Bonny Ling, The News Lens (Taiwan)

Taiwan: Court case of fraudulent labour agency shows plight of migrant workers

Photo: zhaojiankang from Getty Images Pro, sourced from Canva

"Prosecution of a Fraudulent Labor Agency in Taichung: An Insight on the Exploitation of Migrant Workers in Taiwan" 24 February 2021

On January 28, 2021, public prosecutors in Taichung indicted four individuals on charges of human trafficking, violations of the Employment Services Act, and forgery of documents for their role in exploiting Vietnamese migrant workers in Taiwan.

The four involved worked at the Hong Yu Employment Service Agency Company (弘宇人力仲介公司) in Taichung to recruit migrant workers from Vietnam. Established in 2017, Hong Yu placed 126 Vietnamese migrant workers in the construction sector around Taiwan from July 2018 to August 2020. [...]

The Vietnamese workers reportedly undertook heavy overtime to supplement their monthly earnings and feared taking time off. For those who did raise questions about their employment, the agency threatened them with deportation — a threat backed up by the confiscation of their passports and personal papers.[...]

Under the current system, migrant workers heavily depend on labor agencies in their home countries to arrange their employment abroad. Once they arrive in Taiwan, they are again dependent on these entities in their relationship with Taiwanese employers. Taiwanese employers use labor agencies effectively as their contracted human resource team for their foreign worker pool, often citing difficulties of managing across cultures and languages. Migrant workers pay for this human resource service, whereas most professional (so-termed “white-collared”) workers do not bear their own employment’s administrative costs. [...]