Written by Isabelle Cockel.
Image credit: provided by the author.
Labour migration from Southeast Asia to Taiwan has been indispensable to Taiwan’s economic development in the last three decades. Farm work is one of the most recently opened sectors for migrant labour, and migrant farm workers, regular and irregular, have become a new and crucial source of labour in rural Taiwan. How was the recruitment of farm workers justified by the Council of Agriculture (CoA, reorganised to be the Ministry of Agriculture), the lobbyist for opening the farm labour market, and the Ministry of Labour (MoL), the overseer of migrant labour policy, sheds light on three critical and inter-related issues. First of all, the interaction between the two ministries demonstrated how the attitudes towards work, particularly ‘dirty, dangerous and difficult’ (3D) farm work, changed in post-industrial Taiwan. Secondly, their back-and-forth discussions unintentionally revealed how small-scaled, land-renting farmers who lacked a legally certified farmer status were disadvantaged despite being the majority operators in their sectors. Thirdly, young farmers who left 3D farm work for waged employment in urban areas continued to suffer from the disadvantage of their parents after they returned to farm work.
How farm labour is perceived as dirty, dangerous and difficult is essential to how the economic technocrats justify the formalisation of recruitment of migrant farm workers. The decision-making of this recruitment can be found at the Transnational Labour Policy Coordination and Consultation Group (henceforth the CCG). The CCG Meeting is staffed by the Labour Development Agency of the Ministry of Labour, where the MoL authorises requests made by a development-related ministry (or sub-ministerial agencies) that represents the interests of an industry (or a sector within the industry), such as the CoA. Beginning in 2014 and finally achieving its goal in April 2019, the CoA persistently and patiently campaigned to open the farm labour market for the orchid, mushroom, tea, fruit, vegetables, livestock, dairy farming, aquaculture, net cage culture and butchering sectors.
Farm work as 3D work
Speaking volumes for the changed attitudes towards work, an explicit description heard at the CCG meeting (and in everyday life) is that young people would ‘rather work in an air-conditioned office or shop’ than take up any of these dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs on a farm. Related to this is whether farming income is perceived as compensating for the aggregated socio-economic loss to 3D conditions. Therefore, central to the correspondence between the lobbying CoA and the overseeing MoL was the lobbyist’s narration and the overseer’s evaluation of the level of dirtiness, danger and difficulty found in farm work. To prove how 3D resulted in labour shortages, the MoL also demanded that the CoA conduct several surveys to supplement the MoL’s site visits in 2014.
As recorded in the CCG Meetings, the CoA narrated the dissuading 3D working conditions in physical, spatial, and socio-economic terms. Working at a butchering house is dirty because it challenges all human senses; it is unpleasant to see, smell, hear and touch. Working on plantation sites is dangerous because it subjects workers to long hours under the scorching sun, in cold weather, on a highly humid site (a farmer interviewed by a previous study also stressed her concern with exposure to harmful substances such as pesticide or herbicide). Compared to the contextualisation of dirtiness and danger, the contextualisation of difficulty is the most complex. Physically, it referred to manual hard labour, heavy lifting, or repetitive labour resulting in pain or exhaustion. Spatially, it draws a picture of workers isolated in remote or mountainous areas where the transport cost is high. Socio-economically, it summed up the challenges brought about by working during anti-social hours, over the weekend, part-time or fragmented time. It also revealed that workers are paid by the hour or weight of their harvest, are not insured or inadequately insured for their health or protecting them against occupational hazards or have a dim prospect for moving up on the socio-economic ladder. The CoA warned that should farm labour not be replenished by migrant labour, food security, industrial competitiveness (e.g., tea plantation or orchid propagation), and the growth of the sectors supporting or surrounding agriculture (e.g., material, packaging, transport, or tourism) would suffer and lose to the unstoppable force of the ageing of the farming population.
The CoA’s presentations summarised above were meant to show that it was beyond the sectors, as a whole, to change the nature of the work or the working conditions. Therefore, an additional source of labour, external to the socio-economic and cultural environment where the aversion to such work had been cultivated, was imagined to be a solution and was embraced as such. In response, the MoL prescribed solutions to improve the sector’s attractiveness as an employer. The MoL’s propensity to prescribe is related to the principle that migrant labour is not allowed to compete with local labour for employment and is only employed as a supplement rather than a replacement for the shrinking workforce.
In response, the MoL had few tools at its disposal. Its prescription predictably focused on raising wages or requiring farmers to provide labour insurance for their workers, as well as offering support to local governments and mobilising its administrative resources, such as using the staff and budget of the Labour Bureau or the Employment Centres of local governments, to organise job fairs in the targeted areas. It is not surprising to read in the meeting minutes that, after all these efforts were made, the CoA reported at the CCG Meeting that the results were marginal, even when the MoL earnestly organised the mobilisation. Even if there was discernible growth during the mobilisation period, once the campaign ceased and the funding was discontinued, the employment level bounced back to where it was before these efforts. The process of authorising the employment of migrant labour could start at this critical moment when the MoL ceded to these campaigns. The failure of the mobilisation, coordination and support on the part of the MoL was eventually recognised as confirmation that the wage level was a less important issue than the aggregate challenge of dirtiness, difficulty and danger.
Uninsured land-renting farmers: ageing parents and home-returning young farmers
The fact that the farm labour market was open to Southeast Asian workers in April 2019 as a trial and the number of permitted farm workers grew in later years showed that the CoA and the MoL concurred on the presumption that Southeast Asian workers would take up such work. Imagined as being out of desperation or deprivation, migrant workers from these worse-off economies would grasp such opportunities to work in those unpleasant, unfavourable, challenging, harmful and demeaning environments. To accept their arrival in the rural economy as such overlooks the precarity of migrant labour in the dual labour market and the in-built exploitation of the recruitment system collaborated between the Taiwanese state and the brokering industry. This makes it feel cynical to read in the meeting minutes that the MoL insisted on requiring farmers, as employers, to insure migrant workers to protect their labour rights. This insistence on migrant workers’ labour insurance also ironically exposed how the government neglects an army of farming households due to the complexity of certifying individuals who engage farm work for income generation as a legally recognised farmer.
The official certification of farmers as a formal status of socio-economic implications is mostly hinged on land ownership. Lacking ownership deprives tenant farmers and their families, who engage in farming for income generation without land ownership, of the eligibility to be certified as farmers. Without such certification, tenant farmers and their families, who are the majority of the small operators in the agriculture industry, are deprived of farmers’ insurance and pension; they are either uninsured or take up more costly labour insurance offered by agricultural co-ops or agricultural transport operators. Lacking certification also creates inequality between the land-owning farmers who do not engage in farming and the land-renting tenant farmers whose farming is a major source of income since the former is exempt from taxation on incomes (partly due to the fact that their incomes may not reach a taxable level) and free of planning permission scrutiny for their houses built on the farmland.
Therefore, the back-and-forth negotiation between the CoA and MoL about recruiting migrant farm workers and how to insure them against the potential harm caused by dirty, dangerous, and difficult labour unexpectedly revealed how uncertified, small-scaled tenant farmers and their families are structurally disadvantaged. However, the MoL did not seem to be aware of their myriad of difficulties, whereas the CoA did not see the CCG Meeting as the place to address this structural disparity. Challenged by the indifference of the two ministries, one cannot help but wonder how this would incentivise ageing tenant farmers’ adult children, who are inadequately protected as their parent’s generation, to return from towns and cities to engage the dirty, dangerous and difficult work and reinvigorate their villages with their passion for environmentally friendly farming, capital, skills and networking indispensable for reviving the rural economy.
Dr Isabelle Cockel is a Senior Lecturer in East Asian and International Development Studies University of Portsmouth. She is currently the Secretary-General of the European Association of Taiwan Studies.
