The weak link of Taiwan’s microchip industry is migrant labor.
Taiwan is a linchpin of the semiconductor industry, with microchip manufacturing making up 15 percent of its overall GDP. The chip industry is also a key domestic security concern, as Taiwan is one of the few places with the capacity to produce the most advanced chips. Taiwanese firms supply both US and Chinese companies with microchips that power devices from smartphones to spaceships.
However, little attention is given to the migrant labor that underpins the industry. There are approximately 700,000 migrant workers in Taiwan. Most of them come from Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia (35.36 percent), Vietnam (35.05 percent), the Philippines (21.17 percent) and Thailand (8.42 percent). Sixty percent of them work in the manufacturing industry.
Concerns about the exploitation of foreign workers is a sticking point in the government’s New Southbound Policy, which aims to strengthen ties between Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Centered in Taoyuan and Kaohsiung, the high rate of microchip production is supported by factories operating 24 hours. It is mainly migrant workers who take undesirable afternoon to midnight and graveyard shifts, says Intelligence Manpower, a recruitment agency based in Taipei.
Taoyuan is an industrial city in the north dominated by factories that employ migrant workers, the international airport and not much else. It has many dormitories where migrant workers live together in four-bunk-bed rooms which have been found to house more than 30 people.
One testimonial from a factory worker in Taoyuan detailed that the penalty for returning one hour after curfew was a fine of 1.5 days’ base wage and up to two weeks’ pay for staying out overnight. Smoking, drinking or being noisy are other infringements that can be punished with fines or even deportation.
In 2021, due to rising COVID-19 infections in Taiwan, measures were introduced that barred migrant workers living in dorms from being outside for more than three hours per week. This rule applied only to migrant workers.
There have been company-specific and industrywide protests every few years in Taiwan. In 2018, there were protests for better working conditions and fair pay where workers held smartphones and signs that read “we were shipped to Taiwan to make this” and “we were enslaved in Taiwan to make this.”
In 2020, there was consternation from workers after Taiwanese electronic components producer Compal made illegal and arbitrary pay cuts. Last year workers protested for the right to change employers if they wish to.
About 881 migrant workers died or were injured at work from 2017 to 2019 — an average of almost one per day, Ministry of Labor data showed.
Government statistics indicate that migrants working in the manufacturing industry were at about twice the risk of workplace injury compared with local workers.
Taiwan could use concerns over migrant workers “as leverage to get support from countries in Southeast Asia to give tougher statements against Beijing of the dangers or impacts of war on migrant workers,” said Ratih Kabinawa, a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Australia who researches Taiwan’s relations with Southeast Asia.
No matter how the chips fall, Southeast Asia is intertwined with Taiwan’s microchip industry and US-China geopolitics. Improving labor practices has been slow going, but shoring up political allies would be a matter of domestic security and geopolitical stability. As it stands, Taiwan remains dependent on migrant workers to support its most important industry.
Cherish Tay is a law graduate, New Colombo Plan scholar and writer from Australia currently living and studying in Taipei.
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