Do you know your rights?

In recent years, the growing popularity of English has attracted an influx of foreigners to Taiwan's teaching market; however, the number of foreign teachers stuck with difficult contracts is also growing.

Taiwan International Workers' Association (TIWA/台灣國際勞工協會), Taiwan's first non-governmental organization representing foreign workers, has been fighting for immigrant workers' rights for the past ten years.

Since last year, TIWA has been inundated with phone calls from foreign English teachers who were facing a number of problems regarding their teaching contracts and employers. The increasing amount of cases and phone calls spotlights the eroding of foreign teachers' rights.

In addition to catering to the needs of Southeast Asian blue-collar laborers whose rights are being trampled, TIWA is also putting more effort into helping white-collar workers, such as English teachers who work in private language institutes.

According to Wu Jing-ru (吳靜如), the secretary-general of TIWA, an increasing number of foreign English teachers simply endure the problems in their teaching contracts. A large number of foreign workers have no choice but to stay with their employers and sacrifice their rights.

Remaining silent or tight-tipped seems to have become an unwritten rule among the workers.

“The very first problem foreign workers usually come across is the contract, which oftentimes is written only in Chinese,” Wu told The China Post in a Nov. 26 interview. The contracts are supposed to be bilingual, but most of the foreigners sign a Chinese version because they consider the contract to simply be paperwork, Wu said.

However, problems continue to arise when employers fail to honor their contracts.

“Teachers do not receive adequate working hours from employers and do not get full salary; these are usually the cases that happen in Taiwan,” Wu said.

1|2|Next Page>>

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Enter your comments - 3000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos Respond to this email