In popular usage, the term ‘broker’ refers to a person who acts as an intermediary— arranging, negotiating, buying and selling goods or assets for others. Taiwan’s labor brokerage system (or 仲介) for international migrant workers, largely from the Southeast Asian countries of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, ensures a mobile and more easily exploitable workforce to meet the industrial and caretaking demands of modern Taiwanese society. As of 2023, there are around 750,000 migrant laborers in Taiwan, roughly 3.6% of the total 23 million Taiwanese population (Wu, 2024). As of 2018, there were around 1,471 migrant labor brokerage companies in operation (Aspinwall, 2018). More recent data is available under the Ministry of Labor’s migrant labor report and survey, but it is only in Chinese. Global outflows of labor from Southeast Asian countries to Taiwan, a relatively more industrialized country, are mediated by brokers to address the demand for outsourced labor. By recruiting Southeast Asian workers, who constitute an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally ‘distinct’ class, the state has traditionally been able to exclude workers from assimilation, marginalizing them as transient in order to heighten social and economic control (Chun, 2019, 132).
Unlike other East Asian countries like Japan or South Korea that adopt the principle of jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent) when recruiting workers under the theory that ethnic/blood ties allow for a smoother process of cultural assimilation — for example, Nikkei Brazilian migrants in the case of Japan (Ikeuchi, 2016, 7) — Taiwan has resisted accepting Chinese workers. One reason for this is geopolitical tension between Taiwan and China, and the anxiety that allowing immigrants from the People’s Republic of China might erode the de-Sinicized ‘Taiwanese’ national identity that has dominated conversations around Taiwanese national identity since its democratic transition in the 1980s; for example, Chinese spouses intending to immigrate to Taiwan have more stringent bureaucratic barriers than immigrants from other countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia (Chun, 2019, 61). Another reason is the desire to maintain the temporary status of migrant workers, as a means of easier control and by extension, exploitation. As legislator Yu-Chi Li commented, “We want to have migrant workers who come and go. It is less a problem if they are here only temporarily” (Chun, 2019, 64).
In 1989, in response to local business lobbying, the Taiwan government created a temporary guest worker program to recruit migrant workers into “Three D jobs (dirty, dangerous, and difficult)” (Lan, 2006, 34). The National Industrial Association (NIA) threatened to relocate production to China or Southeast Asia if the government did not allow for migrant labor to fill the labor shortage (Chun, 2019, 53). In the case of caring labor, migrant labor was also implemented as an economic strategy to encourage more local women to join the formal economy, increasing the labor participation of women while outsourcing the costs of social care expenses (Chun, 2019, 130). The rhetoric of encouraging women to participate in the formal labor market to alleviate the care burden for dual-income families is seen in policy discussions recorded in Taiwan Legislative Report 81: “Many of the Taiwanese women have obtained higher education and are capable of research and development jobs. But because of their family responsibilities, they cannot contribute their labor to our economy which is a huge loss for our society. If these women can join the workforce, it will certainly help to solve the problem of labor shortage” (Chun, 2019, 54). By filling the care labor market shortage with migrant domestic workers, more Taiwanese women would be able to continue working in the formal economy, while externalizing the costs of domestic labor, particularly elder care, onto hired migrant workers, without the need for the government to expand social services relating to care work. Therefore, Taiwanese capitalists are able to externalize the costs of undesirable factory labor (largely in electronics and semiconductor industries), manual labor (in industries such as fishing, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture) and reproductive caring labor needed for Taiwan’s rapidly aging society— onto a workforce seen as disposable and easily replaceable. Brokerage agencies, in both sending and receiving countries, take advantage of the demand for cheap labor and the economic precarity of these sending countries, which have been greatly impacted by neoliberal trade policies, economic restructuring and financial crises of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the lingering legacies of colonialism (Lan, 2006, 31).
In sum, brokers constitute and largely represent the migrant labor industry, where they control not only the macro-level flows of migrant labor, but also construct the minutiae of workers’ daily lives through their attempts to render a transitory and therefore easily exploitable labor force on-demand. They are the means by which workers enter and are allowed to legally remain in the country, find sources of livelihood, and are the entity to which workers are accountable to during their stay. Some government oversight does exist, such as the Workforce Development Agency under the Ministry of Labor (MOL), and the Employment Service Act (also under the MOL), but private brokerage businesses largely have the freedom to operate under their own discretion.
Migrants are often forced to pay brokerage fees ranging from NTD $60,000 to $200,000, or roughly $2,000 to over $6,600 USD, and there have also been accounts of monthly so-called ‘service’ fees charged to migrants by brokers, despite the lack of providing migrants with support of any kind (Sang and Cheng, 2022). Accounts of migrant workers being pressured by their debts incurred by these brokerage fees to continue working in Taiwan at any cost, including as undocumented or so-called ‘runaway’ (失聯) workers if their contract expires, are commonplace (Yunchan and Liu, 2024). They echo what author Suma Ikeuchi calls “temporal suffocation” in her 2019 book Jesus Loves Japan (50), where migrant workers experience being trapped in limbo between the ‘present’ and the ‘future,’ unable to experience the immediacy of living, and looking towards an uncertain future where they might be able to return to their homeland.
In exploring the keyword of ‘broker,’ I am drawn to questions of how people create life beyond and resist this incorporation into globalized labor flows that create the conditions for and subsequently exploit the migratory instability of workers’ lives. A 2010 documentary called Lesbian Factory (dir. Susan Chen) is one such example, shot by Taiwan International Workers’ Association (TIWA), an NGO that organizes around foreign migrant rights in Taiwan. In this film, workers resist the brokerage system’s attempt at separation and scattering of queer intimacies formed in factory dormitories, with the help of TIWA. Workers at FastFame Factory, an electronics manufacturing factory, were facing imminent factory closure as the company aimed to move towards transnational production outside of Taiwan, while not having received their salary for over two months. Due to the policy of the brokerage system, the company held an employment transfer meeting to randomly re-contract all the workers, and many workers, all women contracted for electronics factory work, were moved to dangerous and unsuitable heavy manual labor jobs in metal-working or cement plants. The brokers and the employers were using a loophole in the law to increase their “foreign worker quota.” By taking on migrant workers from a closed factory, they could add that number to their quota and circumvent a time-consuming quota application process. Then, by coercing the workers to quit, they could import the new migrant male workers that they were looking for in the first place (Lesbian Factory, 2010).
Figure 1. Brokerage agencies separate workers into different factories after the closure of Fast Fame. Susan Chen, Lesbian Factory, 2010, 00:35:30.
The photo above shows a small portion of the process of assigning workers to new employers through a random number assignment process. The workers wait anxiously, some in tears, as they are shuffled off to different locations and separated from their partners. This epitomizes the depersonalized and dehumanizing nature of how brokerage agencies operate, commodifying workers by reducing them to randomized numbers to expedite the flow of low-cost migrant labor.
By working with TIWA, the migrant workers were eventually able to relocate at TIWA’s headquarters, call a press conference with the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA), and won the right to a second, more transparent employment transfer process after the CLA admitted the employers and brokers’ wrongdoings. It was through the workers’ courage and tenacity to keep calling for help, and pushing to not be separated from their queer partners, that their efforts finally succeeded. They were able to successfully fight against the brokers’ arbitrary recontracting process and insist that they be able to choose their places of employment. While the brokerage system sought to scatter the workers to further capitalists’ goals of cheaper labor costs, workers and their supporters resisted this conscription into the brokers’ capitalist flows of labor. In doing so, they disrupted the central role and purpose of these brokers— to constrain workers to a distinct class as the sole mediators of workers’ interaction with the rest of Taiwanese society. By working together with migrant labor NGOs like TIWA, workers were able to break out of the sequestration caused by the brokerage system, forming an alternative linkage and connection for their lives in Taiwan, (in this case, to a portion of Taiwanese civil society), that circumvented the monopolistic control of brokers over their autonomy and daily lives. In thinking about the impact of the relationship between migrant workers and organizations like TIWA, I am reminded of Faier and Rofel’s (2014) ethnographies of encounter, in describing how culture is produced through “engagements across difference” rather than viewing cultural differences as “ temporally fixed and spatially bounded” boundaries (364). If cultural processes of both actors are shaped and emerge through these multi-directional flows of power, how is the work of migrant labor NGO’s like TIWA transforming Taiwanese society, Taiwan’s labor movement, Taiwanese democratic ideals, cross-cultural/international worker solidarity among East and Southeast Asian countries, and queer and working-class liberation?
Works Cited
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Chien, Yi-Chun. "Rights to Settle?—Comparing Migrant Care Worker Policies in Taiwan and South Korea." PhD diss. https://hdl.handle.net/1807/105130
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Ikeuchi, Suma. Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora. 1st edition. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Lan, Pei-Chia. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Duke University Press, 2006. doi:10.2307/j.ctv125jfp6.
Lesbian Factory (T婆工廠). TIWA Taiwan International Workers’ Association (台灣國際勞工協會), 2010. https://tiwa.org.tw/訂購《ｔ婆工廠》《彩虹芭樂》/.
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Liao, Yunchan and Liu, Kwangyin. “The fight in Taiwan for better migrant worker conditions.” CommonWealth Magazine 天下雜誌, January 10, 2024. https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=3597
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