The interest rate of a loan is sometimes calculated on a daily basis, often as much as 2%”; these are the words of an Indonesian care worker in Taipei who struggles not only to pay off her debt to a middle company, but also to make a livable wage in Taiwan and reach her goal of obtaining long-term residency. Taiwan’s policies in the last twenty years actively work to incentivize foreign workers to come, work, and remain on the island. However, these policies unintentionally create restrictive environments based on class and country of origin, providing preferential treatment for white-collar migrant workers while prohibiting and restricting the movement of blue-collar migrant workers. My research argued that the differential treatment of Taiwanese blue-collar migrant workers—enacted through a systemic lack of support in the legislative, domestic, and legal spheres—devalued and undermined their contributions, highlighting governmental neglect of a sector that significantly contributes to Taiwan’s labor force.
Scholars researching Taiwan’s blue-collar migrant workers, such as Jian Yong-da’s explanation of how policy development and labor rights constrained blue-collar migrant workers, and Lan Pei-chia’s examination methods for community building among migrant care workers in the early 2000s, center these workers’ experience. Research using Taiwan as a case study closely examines policy and its effect on lived experiences. However, examining how legal categorization, traditional news presentation, and Taiwanese NGO work shape and constrain blue-collar migrant workers provides a greater understanding of the factors inhibiting a crucial sector of the workforce in Taiwan.
After the legalization of migrant workers in 1990, the Employment Service Act in 1992 regulated industry conditions for foreign workers. As of 2024, the Ministry of Labor stated 61% of the foreign workers in Taiwan worked in hazardous blue-collar industry jobs. Workers under the blue-collar category were provided single-entry visas, while white-collar workers with multi-entry visas. Even as the blue-collar work visa length expanded from three to six years, blue-collar workers’ movement became curtailed when they had to leave Taiwan due to personal circumstances and were forced to reapply for visas, putting strain on both themselves and the visa system. My analysis using a migrant theory framework exemplifies these examples as incidentally creating contradictory policy decisions that further strain Taiwan’s systems.
As the number of blue-collar migrant foreign workers grew the gendered work discrepancy continued. Most industrial jobs were held by men, they could transition across industries and change employers thanks to policies protecting industrial workers’ rights. While many blue-collar women had few job choices outside the laborious and emotionally intensive social care work. Social care work is a separately recognized category in Taiwan that is still categorized under blue-collar work for many, but not all, policies around workers’ rights and labor standards.
For example, should the social care worker’s employer no longer have the ability to retain services, the care worker had to leave Taiwan and apply for a new (almost always single-entry) visa. Only after 2022 could the care worker’s contract be taken up by the next of kin, allowing over 4,000 care workers that year to stay in Taiwan who would previously have had to leave. Additionally, due to the nature of social care work, no policies exist protecting them from exploitation. Social care workers exist under the “Employment Services Act,” which, among other things, does not guarantee a minimum wage while blue-collar industry workers are under the “Labor Standards Act,” providing them a minimum wage and the ability to change employers at will.
This devaluation of blue-collar migrant workers exists not only at the level of the working environment but also in the ease of access to long-term stay in Taiwan. Taiwanese policies are increasingly favorable towards white-collar foreign workers, and even news coverage continues to expound on the preferential treatment contributing to social resentment among the Taiwanese population. And fears around losing Taiwan’s culture and lifestyle are among the main arguments against increased white-collar preferences in media coverage. Situated around these concerns is Taiwan’s current Nationality Act, which allows applicants who have stayed in Taiwan for 5 years if single, 3 if married to a Taiwanese citizen, while holding a baseline salary to apply for citizenship. What is crucial is that the salary requirements for naturalization are often twice the minimum wage, unattainable for many blue-collar migrant workers, even when they make up over half the foreign population. Addendums to the Provisions on Foreign Workers’ Rights of 2022 came under fire after it expressly provided translators, mental health services, and legal support to white-collar workers, only changing the wording to support “workers” after activist movements called into question the clear invisibility of blue-collar workers.
This silence continues through media coverage which inadvertently genders the work type of foreign workers. When discussing female migrant workers, Taiwanese news sources nearly always equate them with social care workers, even when women have and continue to work in blue-collar industry jobs. In the mid-2000s, 125 female factory workers at Flying Alliance International (飛盟國際公司) protested after receiving no wages for 3 months with the help of TIWA (Taiwan International Workers’ Association). When Taiwanese policies towards blue-collar work use male experience as a baseline, additional strain incidentally undermines attempts to assist blue-collar workers as a large category. In Taiwan, it is the employer who subsidizes migrant worker families, a much easier task for an industry factory owner than a family hiring a social care worker, which unintentionally limits the stability of social care workers even further.
My research concluded that Taiwanese policies still ignore the changing perspectives of migration work, continue heteronormative policies, and unintentionally undermine vital blue-collar work by labeling it as less valuable. Overall, Taiwan is a representative case of developed economies and continues to support globalist capitalist systems through these policies.
