3058 Edition
October 4~10, 2010
Editorial
Editorial: the other, less well-known side of the Seine
Translated by Lydia Ma
At the height of the Enlightenment during the 18th century, the left side of the Seine River was often crowded with people who’d come to settle down lazily with their coffees and cigars. The chatter of people reciting or writing poems could be heard along the shore.
Contrast this picture with the other side – the right side – of the Seine River and you’ll find a place bustling with life and activity as Parisian laborers worked with all their might to make a living and prop up the nation’s economy.
History will remember the artists on the left shore of the Seine and forget those on the right shore of the Seine. How unfortunate!
In recent years, we’ve witnessed a lot of new infrastructure and new buildings appear in across Taiwan’s landscape and our politicians have not been modest in claiming these as their accomplishments during election campaigns.
But just like those people on the right side of the Seine River, the foreign laborers who come to Taiwan – the very people who built these high-rises with their own hands – are underappreciated for their efforts.
Not only do foreign laborers have to pay an exorbitant amount of money to their agents, which can amount to 2 or 3 years worth of salaries, if they were to lose their jobs, they’d instantly run into debt and become “fugitive foreign laborers”.
The accidental death of 7 laborers on Highway 6 recently made headlines because 6 of these workers were illegal Indonesian “fugitive laborers”. Though Premier Wu Den-yih ordered an investigation because he felt it was a matter of public safety, it seemed at the end of the day the blame was laid on the laborers themselves.
And just like those people holding their coffees and cigars on the left shore of the Seine, we, the Taiwanese audience who watched this incident unfold in front of our TV screens, forget all about this tragedy as soon as the TV is turned off and the newspaper is thrown into the recycling bin – as though what happened to these foreign laborers has nothing to do with us.
Foreign laborers often pick up jobs that ordinary Taiwanese people find too dirty, dangerous, and physically demanding because that’s their only means to make a living. Add together their desperation and their willingness, and it’s not hard to see why they wind up as the most powerless and abused people in our society.
Ordinary Taiwanese laborers wouldn’t put up with such jobs and would be free to change jobs if they deemed their current jobs as too dirty, dangerous, and demanding. But foreign laborers just don’t have this luxury when their agents are counting every penny they must repay.
So, to place the blame on foreign laborers for accepting jobs that are illegal or too dangerous is not only unfair and demeaning, it’s also cruel and ungrateful of us. We must shed light on whether there were things that were already inherently wrong at the construction site, such as malpractice on the part of contractors, and how much our longstanding discrimination of foreign laborers contributed to this tragedy.
When God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments, God commanded them to observe the Sabbath and explicitly added that Sabbath observance had to be extended to all foreigners and slaves living amongst them. In Deuteronomy 23:15-16, God also forbade the Israelites from returning slaves who’d fled from their masters and warned them against abusing their own slaves.
As God’s representatives on this earth, Christians not only need to reach out to marginalized people and relieve their plight, we must also step out of our stained-glass churches and stand in the gap. Let us cross to the other side of the Seine River and share with these foreign laborers God’s blessings in our lives.
