Taiwan Factory Fire Kills 3 Foreign Workers After Calls to Abolish On-Site Dorms Go Unanswered

A fire in a Taichung factory took the lives of three Vietnamese workers. Past calls to ban on-site housing for factory workers have been rejected by Taiwan’s labor ministry.

Three Vietnamese nationals lost their lives on Sunday when a fire engulfed the second-floor dormitory above their factory in Taichung, just over one year after Taiwan’s labor ministry refused to ban on-site dorms and instead proposed reducing employer’s foreign hiring quotas every time a migrant worker dies.
After the April 2018 fire, Taiwan’s Ministry of Labor initially said it would consider banning on-site dormitories in factories.
It changed course in October 2018 with a proposal that read as a quantification of a foreign worker’s life: For every migrant worker death resulting from negligence, the ministry would reduce an employer’s foreign hiring quota by five. Taiwan’s Control Yuan, which monitors other government agencies, said two months later the labor ministry and other agencies should be censured for failing to monitor unsafe conditions in dormitories. In an investigation of 13 dorms by two committee members, none met government safety regulations.

This article was written by Nick Aspinwall 

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