The breathless praise of Taiwan’s successes halting the spread of Covid-19 sometimes overlooks how prevention measures have had particularly harmful repercussions on the most vulnerable in society.
The case of 140 fishery migrant workers stranded at the Port of Kaohsiung for almost a month was a vivid but little reported on example of this. At the end of their ordeal, the workers were classified as illegal migrants and deported.
A recent press conference held by the Yilan Migrant Fishermen Union (YMFU) and other NGOs at Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan sought to bring attention to the situation of fishery migrant workers under Covid-19, many of whom work on flag of convenience (FOC) ships.
The NGOs called upon the Taiwanese government to ban FOC ships as the working conditions on those ships are especially exploitive. A flag of convenience ship sails under the flag of a country other than the country of ship’s owner. According to the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), “flagging out” allows ship owners to take advantage of minimal regulation, reduced registration fees, low or no taxes, and cheap labor.
At the press conference, the organizations said that lacking regulations, Taiwan’s Fishery Agency does not have jurisdiction over the FOC ships owned and managed by Taiwanese citizens.
The Union’s campaigning extends well beyond their goal to ban FOC ships. Founded in 2013 and based in Nanfang’ao (???), the Yilan Migrant Fishermen Union is Taiwan’s first labor union composed of and led by foreign workers. It is one of the few organizations fighting for the rights and dignity of Taiwan’s fishery migrant workers.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in February, YMFU distributed more than 1,000 medical-grade masks to fishery migrant workers in Yilan County. Recently, YMFU accepted subsidies from Taiwan’s National Human Rights Museum to launched a series of conferences across the country to promote human rights education.
Allison Lee is co-founder and Secretary-General of YMFU. She is a Taiwanese human rights advocate who helped organize fishermen into the union. In 2017, Lee was the first Taiwanese to receive the “Hero Acting to End Modern Slavery Award” from the U.S. State Department.
Wallace Huang, a volunteer legal consultant for YMFU, spoke about how most migrant workers are economic support for their families, and fear losing their jobs, calling them structurally oppressed. Huang has been providing legal advice to YMFU since he was a graduate student at Cornell University. After coming back to Taiwan, he spent a month in Su’ao interning at YMFU. Nowadays, working as a lawyer, Huang can still be seen at most of the YMFU’s events advocating for workers rights and dignity.
2018 The News Lens