| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 傳播學院傳播碩士學位學程 === 106 === Taiwan started to introduce migrant workers since 1990. In 1992, after Employment Service Act passed, large numbers of migrant workers were introduced from Southeast Asia. There are more than 630,000 migrant workers legally registered in Taiwan. Migrant workers in Taiwan have two catalogs: Industrial labor and Social Welfare labor. Industrial labor includes manufacturing, construction industry and fishery. Social Welfare labor includes health taker (household health taker, institutional health taker) and domestic helper.
These migrant workers are introduced as “supplementary” labor by Taiwanese government, but pretended as “lack of labor”. In fact, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, Taiwan economy was urgently facing the crisis of transformation, and traditional industries were largely moved to Mainland China where land and labor were cheaper. In order to temporarily prevent the industrial crisis, the government has introduced migrant workers in Southeast Asia as “cheap labor”.
At the same time, the elderly population in Taiwan has accounted for 7% of the total population in 1993, and Taiwan has entered the so-called “Ageing” society. However, the government has not adopted a long-term care policy, large numbers of Southeast Asian health takers are introduced in order to alleviate the long-term care demand.
After the introduction of migrant workers in Southeast Asia, the numbers of migrant workers are increasing year by year, which means Taiwanese industry and long-term care have long relied on these migrant workers. However, migrant worker policy is designed to be very unreasonable, which makes these migrant workers lose the freedom in the labor market. The design of private broker system has deepened the layer-by-layer exploitation of migrant workers.
This work is reportage literature, it is written after the two years’ field research in Taiwan Intentional Workers’ Association (TIWA). The work is dived into seven chapters, each of which is based on a real story and brings out a topic, including health takers, factory workers, fish man, foreign prisoners. Each chapter is independent and interrelated. Writer uses literary brushwork to write the life stories of these migrant workers in Taiwan.
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