The Ministry of Labor on Wednesday defended a planned pilot program that would enable more flexible employment of foreign caretakers after it was criticized as potentially undermining Taiwan’s domestic workforce.
Under the proposed “pilot project for diversified companion care services,” the government would allow “public welfare organizations” to employ foreign caretakers and dispatch them to private homes to provide medical and general care services for one day, half a day or an even shorter time frame.
The proposed plan, which is expected to be launched later this year, is aimed at offering greater flexibility in self-funded care for people who need it.
Photo: CNA
Under current rules, foreign caretakers are generally employed on a live-in basis, residing with families who hire them to provide full-time care to someone in the household.
As of the end of June, there were 241,532 foreign workers employed in caregiving or other social welfare roles, with 77.2 percent from Indonesia, ministry statistics showed.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Yueh-chin (林月琴) joined the Peng Wan-ru Foundation and others at a news conference on Wednesday in voicing opposition to the ministry’s pilot plan.
“The labor costs for foreign migrant workers are cheap. The salary level is lower than that of Taiwanese workers, and the labor supply is endless,” the foundation’s managing director Wang Pin (王品) said.
The entry of “cheap hourly migrant workers” could “trigger a wave of unemployment” and cause the “collapse” of the long-term care service in Taiwan, Wang said.
Describing the pilot plan as “ridiculous,” Lin said giving employment opportunities to foreign workers “violates the original position” that foreign labor should only be used to supplement labor shortages.
The ministry posted a news release on its Web site the same day.
The pilot plan “establishes a new service model that allows public welfare groups in the professional care sector to become trainers and employers of foreign care workers,” it said.
Compared with the current “one-to-one” model, the new pilot plan represents a more flexible “one-to-many” model that can expand the scope of care provision, it said.
However, the ministry said that it would “continue to listen closely to suggestions from all parts of society, and appropriately evaluate and design mechanisms, content and implementation methods for the pilot plan.”
Affected by rising life expectancy and falling birthrates, Taiwan faces an increasingly acute labor shortage in the care industry.
The National Development Council says the number of people older than 65 in the nation doubled from around 2 million in 2002 to 4.3 million last year.
Taiwan became an aged society in 2018, when more than 14 percent of its population was 65 or older and would become a super-aged society next year when that age group exceeds 20 percent, according to the council.
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