The Management of Foreign Workers in Taiwan

Lee , Joseph S. 2007. The Management of Foreign Workers in Taiwan

For many years, an understanding existed between the government and the unions in Taiwan that the number of foreign workers imported into the island should not exceed 300,000; however, the rapid rise in the number of foreign healthcare workers has cut deeply into the share of foreign workers in the manufacturing sector. In 2006, after many years of complaints by employers within the labor-intensive industries, as well as threats to relocate their production facilitates to mainland China, the government finally divided foreign workers into two broad categories, production workers and service workers. The government then reinterpreted its promise of no more than 300,000 foreign workers to be imported for employment within the manufacturing sector, whilst all healthcare service workers were explicitly excluded from this overall quota. In January 2006, the government also gave the green light to the importation of an additional 20,000 overseas production workers for employment within the category of ‘dirty, dangerous and difficult’ (3D) jobs, those jobs that had become difficult to fill with native workers.

http://www.jil.go.jp/foreign/event_r/event/documents/2007sopemi/taiwan.pdf