The Cabinet yesterday approved a draft bill relaxing the restrictions on foreign white-collar workers in a bid to attract skilled foreigners for the government’s “Asian Silicon Valley” initiative.
The draft bill would relax the regulatory constraints on residence and work permits, taxation, internships, healthcare and retirement benefits.
The bill is aimed at attracting three categories of workers: general specialists, including freelance workers, artists and teachers; specialists of designated fields, including science, economics, education, culture, sports and others; and senior specialists, including highly skilled professionals, university professors, Olympic medalists and coaches of national sports teams.
The 3-year 50% tax cut is only for wealthy folks, but other items look nice. What I don’t get so far is the “residency period” - what does that mean, and how is extending it good?
The act would also extend the residency period for foreign employees from three to five years and scrap a regulation requiring workers with permanent residency to stay in Taiwan for at least 183 days every year.
As things stand, you can get up to three years of residence on an ARC, after which you have to renew it. Extending the period to five years means you have do deal with the red tape of renewing less often.
There are some major advances in that bill.
Allowing children of permanent ARC holders to work.
Finally approving pension payments to permanent ARC holders. Long overdue but great to see.
Even the tax reduction is an extremely progressive move.
Remember those executives can go somewhere else and then Taiwan would get 0% income tax from them.
Also, it doesn’t seem to matter for most people, but the Labor Standards Act allows a contract to be for a fixed or indefinite (permanent) term, yet the Employment Service Act limits a (non-PR) foreigner’s contract to a fixed term only, so an indefinite term is automatically shortened. With this change, indefinite contracts will still be automatically shortened, but to as long as five years.
(The question of whether or not this violates the rights of foreigners, and specifically Americans because of an obscure pre-1949 treaty, is not completely settled.)
a work permit that allows foreign workers to transition between jobs without their employer’s consent
This sounds interesting, but it’s not clear what they mean. There’s nothing on the MOL’s website yet (nor about the new rules on work rights for spouses), as far as I can see.
Many positive proposals here. The key word, though, is “proposal.” Will this draft law make it through the legislature? If it gets through, this would be huge.
This is interesting. Unclear if this means a job with a different company or within the same company
That allows foreign workers to transition between jobs without their employer’s consent
This is a nice welcome, but is there an age restriction?
While children of holders of an alien permanent resident certificate would be allowed to work in Taiwan. The spouse and children of foreign workers with an alien permanent resident certificate would also be able to apply for the certificate.
Foreigners are already able to purchase real estate in their own name, as long as their country allows Taiwanese the same right. I bought an apartment in my own name years ago.
Good on you for doing that on a Taiwanese salary. My tactic is to milk my western salary for savings as long as I can. Hope I can get buy myself a decent box that won’t suffocate me with mould.
Considering Taiwan’s astronomical real estate prices and relatively cheap rents, renting is probably cheaper in the long run anyway. Now if the Chicoms would just lob another missile in our general direction again, maybe prices would come down a little.
It was the SARS crisis wot done for the local property market way back in 2003. I’d rather not go through that again though especially as some good people died in Taiwan.