Language barrier biggest problem for employers of migrant workers: Survey

Taipei, Jan. 6 (CNA) The language barrier was the biggest problem for employers of migrant workers in Taiwan, affecting 8 to 11 percent of those who hire migrant construction, manufacturing and live-in workers, a survey released Monday by the Ministry of Labor (MOL) found.

The survey, conducted in July and August 2024, collected 4,538 valid samples from the manufacturing and construction sectors and 4,016 from employers of live-in caregivers. The MOL said it did not calculate the margin of error or confidence level of the results.

It showed that 39.7 percent of employers in construction and manufacturing who hired migrant workers encountered problems managing them in June that year.

Of those employers, 27.6 percent said there had been a language barrier when communicating with migrant workers. This means around 11 percent of employers in construction and manufacturing encountered the problem.

Meanwhile, 34.7 percent of people who hired live-in migrant caregivers encountered problems and 23.8 percent of those employers said the language barrier had hampered communication with migrants in their employ.

That means around 8 percent of people who hired live-in migrant caregivers had difficulty communicating with them.

Notably, 9.9 percent of employers said they found that their migrant caregiver "used their cell phone too often and spent too much time talking on the phone."

However, the numbers represented a decline from those in the previous year, which showed that around 30 percent of employers in manufacturing and construction had encountered communication issues in June 2023, while around 20 percent of employers of migrant caregivers had the same problem in the same period.

When asked what policies the MOL has put in place to address the language barrier that can arise between migrants and their employers, Chuang Kuo-liang (莊國良), deputy head of the Workforce Development Agency's (WDA) Cross-Border Workforce Management Division pointed to a page on the WDA's Foreign National Labor Rights Portal (https://fw.wda.gov.tw/wda-employer/home/textbook), which has links to basic Mandarin learning materials.

In addition, Chuang referenced the "Migrant Learning Garden" initiative (https://fw.wda.gov.tw/wda-employer/home/activity/2c95efb38fb67f75018fb7f1fdb602cb) launched by the WDA last year, which offers free learning materials created by a private institution commissioned by the agency.