Taiwan is held up as a bastion of liberal values. But migrant workers report abuse, injury and death in its fishing industry

I’m going to add my own notes here for additional context. As well as a few comments down at the end.

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> Taiwan’s distant-water fishing industry depends on more than 20,000 Indonesian and Filipino workers

This is the official, or rather legal, count and does not keep into account illegal workers. In fact, human trafficking is probably problem most associated with the Taiwanese offshore fishing industry. The most well known example is the Great Ocean Company, involved in the illegal trafficking of nearly 1,000 Cambodian men to fishing vessels of the aforementioned Taiwanese company.

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> In 2023, 10 Indonesian crew members aboard the You Fu vessel were owed 15 months of wages, while they were out at sea with no way to contact families or verify payments, according to Taiwan’s official Central News Agency. The fishermen were forced to eat bait with instant noodles due to food shortages, and faced routine verbal abuse, it reported, adding the salaries were eventually settled after the owner came under mounting pressure from media coverage.

To read more about this: [10 Indonesian fishermen owed 15 months’ worth of unpaid wages totaling 2.4 million NTD (~80 thousand USD)](https://www.civilmedia.tw/archives/127531)

(if you can’t speak Chinese just Google translate it or ChatGPT/Deepseek it, it’ll probably do just ok, it also contains additional details on Taiwanese government’s attempts to improve things)

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> Unlike most migrant workers in Taiwan, distant-water fishermen operate under a different set of rules and are excluded from Taiwan’s Labor Standards Act, meaning they lack protections for overtime pay and health insurance that others are entitled to.

To elaborate on this, this is even more of a double standard than it seems: if you are hired as a fisherman domestically, within Taiwan, you are under the Ministry of Labor; if you are hired from overseas, you are under the hoodlums at the Taiwan Fisheries Agency. And so Taiwanese fisheries workers benefit from the Labor Standards Act, while foreign workers are de-facto under a completely separate set of labor standards—the Fisheries Law.

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Comment: Most of this concerns only fisheries workers, partly because other workers have (thankfully) benefited from some government action. That said, one of the problems that exist within the background of this article is also just that of employment agencies and the brokerage system.

This problem dates to the 1992 Employment Service Act designed to streamline the hiring of migrant workers through “private employment service agents”, i.e. the brokers.

These brokers are a problem for all migrants, they take a cut of the wages, have been caught taking migrants’ documents such as their passports, and have disproportionate power over a migrant worker’s life. Attempts to reform the system to prevent problems have failed, an easy example of this is when the government forbid the extraction of “service fees” from migrant workers; the brokers simply replaced it with a different “voluntary” fee, which if not paid however de-facto bars them from finding a job. Migrants can seek jobs without the brokers, but they lose health insurance and other social protections.

Calls to abolish the system and to allow employers to hire foreign workers directly have been made for years, it can only be hoped that the government can at least consider reform especially considering Southbound policy and that most of these workers are Southeast Asian.