The second semester at Taipei Medical University is almost over, halfway to a masters degree.
This week I am in the data collection phase of the first social research I have conducted.
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I could say a few words about Indonesia and Taiwan. Indonesia has a long history of migration, initially internal. Since the 1970s, the Indonesian state has been organizing the export of surplus labor (overwhelmingly women) to a number of key countries: Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. This exporting of labor has generated a huge flow of funds into Indonesia, in the form of remittances, which has served to mask the inept economic management on the part of the government.
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The intersection between Taiwan and Indonesia is in filling ‘the care gap’; because Taiwan (and Malaysia) have, since the 1980s, pursued a high-skilled economy, women have been drawn into the labor force in increasing numbers. This has left young children and the elderly with nobody to care for them. In the case of Taiwan, this situation is aggravated by the facts of a rapidly aging population and the country’s low birth rate (the world’s lowest) and the numbers of foreign domestic workers in Taiwan continues to increase (up 8% last year).
While women from the Philippines initially filled these domestic worker/caregiver roles, over the last decade Indonesian women have displaced them (the reasons for this are perhaps cultural, in that an image has been developed of the Indonesian woman as ‘the perfect maid’; docile, not too bright, hard-working, etc.). Today there are about 150,000 Indonesian domestic workers in Taiwan.
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The legal picture regarding domestic workers is that they are exempt from the provision of the Labor Standards Law, joining a number of other occupations, such as fire fighters, nurses, doctors, lawyers, etc., that are neither allowed to unionize, nor to strike. These groups are also not bound by the maximum working week of 48 hours. For domestic workers, this means that their contracts usually stipulate no days off (certainly for the first year), and this fact, along with the amount of power their employer has over them, has led advocacy groups to invoke the term ‘slavery’ to describe the situation of these workers.
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For this research, I firstly engaged in extended dialogue with a number of Indonesian domestic workers, and from this I developed a questionnaire that was translated into Bahasa Indonesian. The aim is to gather some evidence on work conditions, what time off is received (if any), sources of conflict with employer, and attitudes towards the Taiwan National Health Insurance scheme that these women are obliged to join. Other surveys have been conducted, but hopefully the more open questions in my survey will take me beyond these in terms of the knowledge gained.
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Onwards.
