This is, completely, LOPSIDED if you ask me! Translated…
At the beginning of July, a ton of my Indonesian friends virally shared a footage on FB,, it was about three minutes in length, at first, there were, ten Indonesian wearing the unified yellow-colored uniforms, standing in two lines, there were men and women, uneven in stature and height. At this time, a woman from outside the frame suddenly spoke to them in Chinese, “are you all ready?”, then, these ten individuals, like members of a marching troop, replied back to her, “Yes we are!”
That woman barked out an order, and this group of Indonesian bowed three times deep toward the camera, then, with their right fists, high up in the air, and started reciting a series of Chinese, although they have thick accents, but, after hearing it a few times, you can understand that they were saying, “Good afternoon, I want to work, I will, work well, I don’t need days off working in Taiwan, I swear, that I shall never run away, as I’m working in Taiwan.”
Based off of understanding, this group of Indonesian were trained laborers in the agencies, in the future, they are to come over here by flight to work in the factories, although they may have NO clue what the long sentence in Chinese they’d spoken meant, but the superiors had them say it, they can only, recite the phonetics of the Chinese pronunciations, and called it aloud. I’d watched how the Indonesians of the online community saw this, some offered blessings to these people who are about to embark to work, some felt that their thick accents, speaking in Chinese were, funny, suspected that it was, a video joke, but, as a Taiwanese, I couldn’t, laugh.
Actually, this sort of having the workers called out, is something familiar for the Taiwanese culture. We can from time to time, see the managers of a company, leading a group of uniformed workers standing outside the shops, bowed down hard, and, called out to the passersby. This behavior came from the Japanese enterprises, but, it didn’t matter when it’d started, trending here in Taiwan, just knew, that the local business owners, enjoyed these sorts of “group cohesiveness”, and so, the workers from Southeast Asia are, forced to learn this too.
To tell the truth, do you think those workers who were made to stand outside on the streets, and calling aloud like this? Not necessarily, and, even, for someone who’s, quite timid, it’s, surely, uncomfortable, but, this was, the trends of work in Taiwan, using the name, of forcing oneself to have more guts, but, it’s still, a sort of an, authoritarian way of running a company, your manager wanted you to do it, you don’t have the right to say, “no”, otherwise, you can, find work elsewhere…just take a look, at how many people here, worshipped the C.E.O. of Foxx Con, Terry Go.
And yet, as citizens here can quit their jobs, if they don’t feel like doing it, the migrant workers are, not so lucky. In the employment laws, they couldn’t, switch companies they worked in as they wanted to, and, as they’d signed their contracts, they’d needed to, slave themselves for the same company for three whole years, unless the company had done something to break the laws (and this needed hard proofs). And, if they were, faced with bullying in the workplace, wrongful disciplines, and the company wanted to sweep it under the rugs, there’s nothing they can do, and, for the sake of their livelihood, they can only, swallow all the hardships down.
The reason in sum, perhaps, our society had a better view of “slave workers” more so than the workers who are capable, the less opinions the workers had, the better behaved, the better, especially those from Southeast Asia, they wouldn’t “run off” to another company—hey, that’s NOT the demands of their workplace, it’s what they were, calling aloud in front of the camera lenses!
And so, this, is only on the sides of the migrant workers, but, they’re the ones who’d, signed on to work here, and, yeah, I admit, that these migrant workers are taking up the jobs that citizens here, don’t normally do (kinda like how the illegal immigrants of the U.S. are working at jobs that are mostly related to manual labor, because U.S. citizens would much rather sit in their air-conditioned offices???), but hey, if they don’t need the work, why would they come here, and, after they’d come here, they’d realized, hey, this is, WAY too hard for me, and they wanted to escapes? And, this gave this country a bad name, in how we’d, MISTREATED our migrant workers??? This article is only based off of the side of the migrant workers, the writer failed to take into considerations, the owners of the businesses, or the separate households that needed these workers.