Labor Migration Regime and Factory Dormitory in Taiwan

Taiwan adopts guestworker scheme to hire migrant workers from Southeast Asia for its labor shortage in elderly care and manufacturing sector. To efficiently govern migrant workers, the government issues many regulations to constrain their labor rights, which is effectively implemented through the labor brokerage system. In this paper, I will explore the factory dormitory regime which assists to monitor migrant workers to become a docile working machine.

Based on the fieldwork of a big semi-conductor manufacturing company in Kaohsiung in 2006 to 2007, I find that, in addition to government regulations, company, broker and dormitory owner work together to control migrant worker’s life round the clock. It is almost impossible to escape from such multiple surveillance forces, and through such a dormitory regime the capital can obtain not only cheap but also taming labor force.