V. Migrant Domestic Workers Gender Equality in Employment. According to information provided by the Ministry of Labor, from 2017 to 2020, 1,564 migrant domestic workers terminated their contracts with employers by mutual agreement due to pregnancy, but there are no statistics on the number of workers who have continued to work in Taiwan.34 23. Migrant domestic workers are vulnerable to sexual assault, sexual harassment, and other high-risk maltreatment.35 Labor officials often define sexual harassment complaints by migrant domestic workers as labor disputes and fail to take the cases seriously.36 In the context of an unequal power relationship, the victims often choose to suffer quietly or run away.
34 According to the Control Yuan investigative report Pregnancy Cases of Female Migrant Workers approved on April 20, 2022, in practice, there are still cases in which employers and brokers, upon learning a migrant worker is pregnant, request or persuade her to return to her home country before the seventh month of pregnancy or terminate or not renew the contract for other reasons, such as the cared-for person can now be taken care of by the family themselves or the migrant worker’s performance has fallen short of assessment standards. It is also true that some migrant workers are forced by their employers or brokers to terminate their contracts and return home after they become pregnant, but the verification process fails to detect this. Furthermore, some pregnant migrant workers are worried about contracts being terminated, so they hide their pregnancies or do not go for prenatal checkups. As most migrant workers are not covered by labor insurance, there is no information on the actual number of those who have returned home after their contracts were terminated due to pregnancy.
35 For details see the Control Yuan investigative report Review of the Reporting, Communication, Protection, and Support Mechanisms in Sexual Assault Cases for Female Migrant Workers in Taiwan approved on May 2, 2018, and the Migrant Workers’ Personal Safety and Labor Rights report approved on Mar 16, 2022. MOHW statistics show that 186 female migrant domestic workers were sexually assaulted between 2017 and 2021.
36 According to the MOL’s 24-hour counseling and protection 1955 hotline for migrant workers, 1,231 cases of sexual harassment and sexual assault against female social service sector migrant workers were processed from 2017 to 2021, only 22 cases (1.7%) went to judicial proceedings, 147 cases of sexual assault were processed, and 45 cases (30.6%) went to judicial proceedings.
¯25¯