To be honest, this is why I focus all my energy on dual citizenship. As this is often the silver bullet to 90% of the issues. And then a what’s your excuse now to the other 10%, like this is towards naturalised citizens.
Fighting every single company alone as a foreigner is going to run you down and drain your wallet. I have no problems draining my wallet, but I want that to be an efficient use of my blood, sweat and tears. I think you can agree. I’d rather start tackling these issues after dual citizenship is solved. Many of us, myself included have fulltime jobs which can make this slow, so I am quiet right now because I do my bidding in the background for now as I try to set up the legal frameworks to try to help create a more organised and co-ordinated effort, for not just dual citizenship, but for everything as right now the only one legally allowed (and willing to) to fight for us is @fifieldt and as much as he’s been able to accomplish, it’s still the influence of one person.
I’d recommend against this petition because A) we’re foreigners and don’t have rights, B) I don’t want unelected government officials to codify anything that might be even more unfavourable, as there may be people who would look at this and say, ‘hmm. sounds reasonable’. And there are. It doesn’t affect the locals directly and it’s going to be very hard convincing those in unelected governmental positions to, putting it mildly, give two shits as you can see from @Mataiou’s reply letter.
I can appreciate the enthusiasm, but my opinion at this moment is to save our energy for creating a situation where we are able to secure our rights first before going after companies individually as this will burn out.
A petition is not going to do much because you’re not a consitituent. Petitions are for politicians to look at opinions from constituents and because many are unable to see the benefits foreigners bring to Taiwan, like a recent store I went to, ‘taking our business elsewhere’ is not quite the motivator we think it is in Taiwan. If you’re not a Zuckerberg type, both implicitly and as @Icon recently learned explicitly from similar efforts, they could not care less. You’re not important enough.
Journalists are primarily sloppy and tabloidy, they are a business to make money and sympathy to ‘those foreigners that make so much money, cause so much trouble and fuck all our women’ (despite it being untrue) is possible to backfire. These kinds of sympathy stories here for anything except the worst and most vile of racism are either going to be ignored, or edited in a way to make us look bad if it gets the views. Especially Apple Daily, the biggest tabloid of them all. There’s a real risk of one of us screwing it up like the Antiwork Subreddit Mod talking to Fox News or Adam Ragusea talking to Vox. They have a job to do, and that is to make money. This has real potential to set us back and turn public opinion against us.
The only way to force a discussion on this in a legal is to sue. Like same sex marriage, this can be done in the court. This can take years and cost upwards and over a million. To do that for one company or the government about the financial industry will leave us burnt out and financially drained and with little appetite to do it again for the actual battle of helping to remove that aforementioned 90% of discrimination with the added benefit of kneecapping anyone that says ‘but but but, they’re foreign born!’.
When we are on the other side, we can help pull our foreign friends out of the hole and take a pickaxe to their discrimination, but right now we have a huge glass ceiling to start picking at and this is probably where I am going to stay at the moment.
I understand this may not be the answer you were looking for, but with a full plate like many others here that live in Taiwan, I’d recommend instead drawing energy to the dual citizenship issue and not at individual companies just yet. Trust me, it was hard! Cost me $15000 out of pocket. I’ve done it already. You know what they did? They restored the discriminatory rule a year later. This was an expensive exercise that nullified any savings I would’ve gotten and they just simply changed the rules back. This isn’t meant to be cynical, but I’m one person. So… while it does seem like I mention dual citizenship a lot, and I do, it’s for good reason. I’m trying to hammer home that this is the most efficient way to solve a shit tonne of discrimination issues at once while providing us extra ammo to tackle the ones that remain unsolved.