Aung Lin-Week 4-Blog 4

I will write my blog about Pei-Chia Lan’s article “Legal Servitude and Free Illegality.” Lan talked about an oversea contract worker from Philippines name Priscilla. Lan talked about how Priscilla worked as a domestic worker and there are many others out there like her in Taiwan. We talked about remittances that these oversea workers sent home in class this week and even considered writing anthology chapter on it. Lan said many oversea contract workers like to go to Taiwan because of its attractive wages. I didn’t know that people from Philippines can go to Taiwan legally. They’re very lucky because I have family members that live in Taiwan and they left Burma using tourist visas and stayed there undocumented. Like Filipino OCW, my family members worked in Taiwan as domestic workers. In Burma, there’s no such thing as OCW and everyone wants to go to America but it’s impossible so they used visiting visas to go to Taiwan. All these OCW had to pay a lot of placement fees. They all worked hard to prove their employers loyalty so that their contracts will be renewed. I was also shocked that many OCW ran away from their jobs and continue to live there undocumented and many others used fake passports to go in and out of Taiwan. Philippines at least let people in their country go work in Taiwan legally unlike Burma.

Question:

Why does Taiwan accept OCW from Philippines? Is it because of their reputation? Why does Taiwan accept Filipino OCW from Philippines when they can have cheap labor from China? Are Filipino OCW better employees than Chinese? How?  

Work Cited

PeiChia Lan. “Legal Servitude and Free Illegality: Migrant “Guest” Workers in Taiwan.” 2007. Asian

Diasporas. California: Stanford University Press.

Filipinos filling out applications to become oversea contract workers like Priscilla