The Control Yuan has ordered the Ministry of Labor (MOL) to enforce existing legal protections for pregnant migrant workers in Taiwan, following an investigation into the issue by two of its members.
At a press conference Monday, Control Yuan members Wang Yu-ling (???) and Wang Mei-yu (???) said the agency had issued the MOL a directive to take corrective measures after reviewing their investigation on April 20.
During the event, Wang Yu-ling noted that Taiwan removed pregnancy tests from migrant workers’ routine health checks in 2015, and had laws prohibiting employers from firing migrant workers for becoming pregnant.
Despite these protections, Wang said, employers and brokers often pressure pregnant workers to break their contract and return home before the seventh month of their pregnancy.
Meanwhile, other employers fabricate reasons — such as saying a caregiver’s patient no longer needs assistance, or that a worker did not pass a performance review — to terminate or refuse to renew the contract of a worker who gets pregnant, she said.
As a result, some female migrant workers avoid seeing a doctor over the course of their pregnancy and even give birth in secret because they are scared of losing their jobs, she said.
To illustrate the problem, the Control Yuan members cited statistics showing that 15,648 female migrant workers had received a one-off maternity benefit from the government between 2018 and 2021.
Of the total, 13,300 of the workers had already returned to their home countries when they received the payment, 8,010 of whom had left Taiwan after the termination of their contracts, they said.
Moreover, the proportion of pregnant migrant workers who had their work contracts canceled and left Taiwan rose from around 40 percent in 2018 to 66.1 percent in 2021, indicating that the problem was only getting worse.
During the investigation, the Control Yuan members interviewed 18 migrant worker mothers in the industrial and social welfare sectors, as well as one worker’s spouse.
Through these discussions, they heard of a range of problems the women faced during pregnancy, such as being unable to adjust their workloads or get leave for health checks, Wang Yu-ling said.
Some were also pressured to dissolve their contracts, or had to give birth in worker dormitories or at the house of a friend, Wang said.
While the MOL’s 1955 hotline is supposed to offer migrant workers a way to report such issues, more than 60 percent of cases reported via the hotline in 2020 and 2021 were closed because the individual who filed the complaint had withdrawn it or left the country, she said.
Based on the investigation, Wang said, the Control Yuan urged the Ministry of Labor to enforce available laws and guidelines to better protect pregnant migrant workers in the country.
Under the Control Yuan Act, government agencies that are directed to take “corrective measures” are supposed to make improvements and detail their actions to the Control Yuan.
If no reply is received within two months, the Control Yuan can order the agency to respond in writing or by sending an official to testify in person.
In a response late Monday, the Ministry of Labor said it was working to improve the guidance it provided to migrant workers on their legal rights in Taiwan, including through its multilingual webpages and a chatbot service on the Line messaging app, and would conduct periodic reviews of the issues raised in the report.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel