With tourism boom, better jobs for Filipinos in Taiwan seen

TAIPEI—With the thawing of once icy relations between China and Taiwan, new opportunities might just open up for Filipinos who want to work overseas but are not happy with just scrubbing floors and toiling in sweatshops.

For over a year now, this island-nation of 23 million has drawn countless visitors from mainland China through direct tourist flights, blurring hostile lines that once divided the two.

Taiwan has started building new hotels and improving other lodgings as the number of regular flights from the mainland reached an average of 20 per week, said Antonio Basilio, managing director and resident representative of the Manila Economic and Cultural Office (Meco) here.

“This means a lot of opportunities for Filipino workers,” Basilio told reporters during a visit to his office on Tuesday.

Of the roughly 80,000 Filipino workers in Taiwan, about 53,000 or 67 percent have landed jobs in electronic or manufacturing factories, he said. The rest work either as domestic help or caregivers.

Taiwan’s Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) pegged the number of overseas Filipino workers here at 68,000, with 21,000 employed as caregivers and 47,000 in factories.

Early last year, Taiwan took a bold step towards warmer relations with China, which regards the island as part of its territory, by opening air traffic to the mainland. Travel routes between the two countries had been halted after the outbreak of a civil war in 1949.

English required

With Taiwan opening its doors to its big next-door neighbor, Basilio said Taiwan would have to be more “international” in its outlook, hence, “English is a number one requirement.”

He said Filipino workers would find it easy to land jobs in the flourishing tourism industry here because they speak English better than their Asian counterparts. “Besides, the Philippines is very near Taiwan,” Basilio added.

Taiwan officials said there was a need for the country to push for more development projects to accommodate the surging number of visitors now pegged at about three million yearly.

Infrastructure important

“Infrastructure is very important, and this includes the transportation system, hotels and resorts, for which we will spend a lot of effort,” said Chung-Hwa Tuo, commissioner of the Taipei Department of Information and Tourism, in an interview.

Dr. Pan Shih-Wei, CLA political deputy minister, predicted that roughly 200,000 jobs can be created in Taiwan if trade agreements the country was trying to seal with China would push through.

Most of these jobs would come from the manufacturing and tourism industries, he added. Whether this would immediately benefit Filipino workers would have to depend on labor policies between the Philippines and Taiwan, he said.

“When the Taiwanese economy grows, we will benefit because we supply the workers and some electronic goods also,” Basilio pointed out. Meco, he said, was also looking for jobs for Filipino engineers, scientists and teachers.

The Philippines continues to be Taiwan’s top source of electronic workers, despite the recent global financial crunch that forced major companies to lay off at least 5,000 Filipino workers from August 2009 up to March this year.

Taiwan, however, has started receiving additional electronic product demands from the mainland with improved relations between the two, said Meco Labor Affairs Director Rodolfo Sabulao. “And the companies have started requesting more Filipino workers from us,” he added.

Priority rehiring

Sabulao said Meco was also making arrangements with these companies to make sure that recently repatriated Filipino employees were on the priority list for rehiring.

He said that Meco and the CLA were also working together to implement a direct-hiring policy among employers in the country so OFWs would not have to pay exorbitant placement fees to domestic and foreign brokers.

This year, the CLA expanded the program to cover all kinds of workers and new hires. –Jocelyn Uy, Philippine Daily Inquirer