Taiwan to jack up numbers of directly hired Pinoys

Philippine and Taiwan officials have signed a memorandum of understanding on direct hiring of Filipino workers by Taiwanese employers, according to a report on news site Focus Taiwan. As a result, such a move would prevent prospective overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) from going through the traditional agencies or brokerage firms to land a job in Taiwan, the report said. According to Lin San-quei, director general of the Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training under the Council of Labor Affairs, direct hiring cuts costs for both employers and employees as they need “not go through expensive brokers to reach a deal." At the recently concluded fifth bilateral meeting between the two countries, Manila was hoping that more Taiwanese employers would hire workers directly, Lin said, noting that only 3 percent of OFWs in Taiwan were hired directly by their employers. However, no conclusions were reached during the meeting regarding the percentage of directly hired Filipino or the total number of such workers allowed to take jobs in Taiwan, the report said. Great contributions During the opening ceremony of the meeting, Lin said Filipino workers have made great contributions to Taiwan’s economy, thanks to their high level of education and English-language proficiency. Of the thousands of Filipino workers in Taiwan, 53,868 of them work in the manufacturing sector, while 22,994 work as caregivers, according to Taiwanese government’s statistics. Filipinos, the third-largest national contingent of migrant workers in Taiwan, account for about 20 percent of the 395,944 foreign workers there as of April 2011, the statistics also revealed. — JE, GMA News