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Updated Sunday, May 16, 2010 11:35 am TWN, By Daniel J. Bauer

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Foreign worker abuse a taint on Taiwan

A fair number of students in my ethics courses over the years have strongly resisted any argument that Taiwan deserves a mediocre reputation for treatment of foreign workers. I have often discovered that even students who appear to be open-minded on such controversial issues as abolition of the death penalty or gender equality tend to react angrily when I suggest that too many Taiwanese employers routinely look down upon or flagrantly mistreat workers from Asian countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

Issues that touch on the treatment of laborers belong in an ethics course as examples (often glaringly obvious) of behavior that offends principles like the dignity of the human person, fairness, and respect.

These same students are quick to criticize the injustice and ugliness of racism in the United States that writers such as James Baldwin or Flannery O'Connor portray in some of their short fiction. Consider works like Baldwin's moving “Sonny's Blues,” and O'Connor's acerbic “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

What explains this discrepancy? How is it that we tend to see the evil that exists far away, and in the hands of others, and fail to notice the wrong that we are a part of, the wrong that festers close to home?

Personal experience can help to narrow the gap. Students may respond readily to literary scenes that feature racial divisions abroad because they have traveled or studied there, and have themselves been victims of discrimination.

A local English newspaper reported this week that prosecutors have charged a Banciao woman with human rights violations. After a sleigh of hand with paperwork, she had hired three Indonesian workers as caregivers, but then shuffled them off to do factory work. The workers had earlier contacted labor authorities and said they were being pressured to work from 7 a.m. till midnight.

Incredibly, the employer, Chang Wen-ling, allegedly forced the workers, who are Muslims, to eat pork on numerous occasions. Prosecutors appeared especially incensed by this denial of religious freedom, given Muslim dietary practices. Miss Chang reportedly admitted she wanted the three to eat pork “so they would have more energy to do work,” but said she didn't force them.

Prosecutors originally hoped to pin trafficking charges on the woman, but were unable to because the Human Trafficking Prevention Act was not in effect at the time the abuse occurred. I call that a shame.

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