Chen Hui-chi director of the Taipei City Foreign and Disabled Labor Office (FDLO), said 433 labor-management disputes required government mediation between April and June, which is double the figure from with same period last year. Director of FDLO said 85 percent of the 433 mediations were applied for by foreign laborers, with the rest coming from employers. According to statistics, 225 mediations involved working contract or wage issues, 95 concerned management details, and 96 incidents involved health insurance issues, taxation or language misunderstandings and 7 cases concerned working overtime or occupational injuries.
The number of foreign labor-management dispute mediations between April and June was double that of the same period in 2012, Director of FDLO said most of the incidents were triggered due to language-barriers or foreign workers suffering from homesickness or culture shock.
Moreover, the growing number of foreign workers in Taipei might be another reason why there are so many disputes that require the city government to step in.
There are currently over 40,000 foreign laborers working in Taipei — 97.28 percent are homecare staff, in which 73 percent of them are Indonesian so that the mediations mostly involved Indonesians.
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