The Ministry of Labor (MOL) on Thursday said it has officially launched a pilot program for dispatching foreign care workers to multiple households in one day, with the migrant caregivers potentially working up to 14 hours in a 24-hour period.
Under the new “Pilot Program for Diversified Companion Care Services” devised by the ministry, commercial and nonprofit organizations would be allowed to employ foreign care workers and dispatch them to multiple residences in a single day for a minimum of four hours at a time, the ministry said.
Under current rules, foreign care workers are generally employed on a live-in basis, residing with families that hire them to provide full-time care to someone in that household.
Photo: CNA
The pilot program launched on Thursday is aimed at offering greater flexibility for self-funded care, the ministry said.
“Applicants for the program must meet certain criteria, such as having a disability certificate, proof of a severe illness, post-surgery medical records, or being assessed as needing long-term care at levels 2 to 8,” said Su Yu-kuo (蘇裕國), head of the Cross-Border Workforce Management Division of the ministry’s Workforce Development Agency.
“The services provided may include providing basic daily care, accompanying them when going out, accompanying them to receive medical treatment, offering safe companionship, and so on,” Su said.
The minimum caregiving time for any migrant worker dispatched to a residence would be four hours, and if it is a 24-hour request, this “must include 10 hours of rest,” Su said.
Despite announcing the launch of the program, the ministry has not decided how much a household would pay for the labor of migrant care workers under the plan, nor provided any information on how much the care workers could earn.
“The service charges would be determined after [the potential commercial or nonprofit organizations] submit their plans, and a selection committee would evaluate them,” Su said.
The ministry yesterday held a briefing with more than 30 potential caregiver-dispatching organizations, saying the application to apply would be released soon.
The ministry expects that at least three commercial or nonprofit organizations in the northern, central and southern regions of the country would each hire about 10 foreign care workers in the first year of the program, Su said.
In August, the ministry’s program was criticized by lawmakers and non-governmental organizations as potentially undermining the domestic workforce, given that foreign migrant workers can legally be paid less than Taiwanese workers.
The monthly salary for live-in migrant caregivers and domestic helpers is NT$20,000, nearly a third lower than the minimum wage of NT$27,470 guaranteed to Taiwanese workers under the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
As of the end of June, there were 241,532 foreign workers employed in caregiving or other social welfare functions, more than three-quarters of whom (77.2 percent) were from Indonesia, ministry data showed.
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