Charles Niece accompanies and trains migrant workers to defend their rights, confronting labor abuses in Taiwanese factories.
By Paul Jeffrey
Maryknoll volunteer in Taiwan empowers workers to challenge global supply chain abuse
When Charles Niece graduated from Seton Hall University, he considered pursuing further studies. But first he wanted a change of scenery.
“My knowledge of Christian mission was confined to a classroom, formed by reading scholarly journals and writing research papers. I needed a year off with exposure to the real world,” Niece says.
He applied to the Maryknoll short-term volunteer program, was accepted, and in 2019 flew to Taiwan, where he was assigned to work with Maryknoll Father Joyalito Tajonera in Taichung, Taiwan’s third-largest city. There Father Tajonera — known as “Father Joy” — runs a shelter for migrant workers housed in the Tanzi Catholic Church, a lively congregation centered in the Filipino migrant community.
Niece helped out in the parish and studied Mandarin Chinese at Providence University. He also practiced what he called a ministry of presence, listening to Filipinos in the congregation and shelter. He soon started learning Tagalog.
Before his one-year commitment was up, international travel ground to a halt as governments closed their borders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Niece enrolled in a master’s program in business administration at Providence.
As migrant workers wrestled with the pandemic, Niece listened to their growing concerns. He wanted to do more than just refer them to the government’s Ministry of Labor. He began helping the migrants carefully prepare the documentation they needed to prove allegations of abuse or unfair treatment. Often that meant preparing written complaints in English, as functionaries in the labor office rarely spoke Tagalog.
“I’d save all relevant text messages that proved the employer or agent was threatening or deceiving the worker. I’d review pay stubs and timecards to compute years of unpaid wages. And I’d review bank statements revealing exactly when unauthorized deductions occurred,” he says.
Codes of conduct on paper that are not enforced
During a business ethics class, Niece studied the infamous Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013 that took the lives of 1,134 workers and injured more than 2,500 others. He learned about the Foxconn suicides in China, mostly in 2010 and 2011, which were proven to have been linked to exploitative conditions. These events illustrated how giant international brands failed to address human rights risks in their supply chains.
Niece also learned about supplier codes of conduct, the corporate policies that were supposed to guarantee basic rights in factories around the world. He had heard enough from the Filipino workers to know that the codes — achieved thanks to decades of shareholder activism — were not regularly put into practice in Taiwan.
“I began reading these spectacular codes of conduct and human rights policies from companies like Apple, Intel, HP and IBM. Like hundreds of other U.S. companies, they have strict policies against modern slavery, including policies against charging recruitment fees, holding workers’ passports and identity documents and setting dormitory curfews. Yet migrants were coming to the church every day for help with those exact issues,” he says. “It left me wondering if U.S. companies sourcing from Taiwan really knew what was going on here.”
Reading the codes of conduct also made Niece question how Taiwan’s government responded to complaints.
“After I helped workers document their cases, I’d often accompany them to the labor office. I realized the Taiwanese government had low standards. At one hearing I raised concerns about international business standards, and the Taiwanese employer just laughed at me,” Niece says.
The gray areas of labor exploitation
Many of the practices proscribed by corporate codes of conduct — retention of passports, withholding wages, restrictions on freedom of movement — don’t necessarily violate Taiwanese law, thus creating what Niece calls “a gray area” where local custom and corporate ethics collide.
Niece decided to put the codes of conduct to a test. He identified two U.S. electronic brands that were the main buyers from a factory where workers had labor complaints. He then helped the workers contact those two companies.
“The Filipina workers had previously reported their complaints to both the Ministry of Labor and the Philippines government representative in Taiwan, but nothing had changed,” Niece says. “I convinced them to reach out to their factory’s buyers. I was pessimistic anything would happen, but felt we should try.”
Within two weeks, the two U.S. companies sent auditors to investigate and talk directly with the workers. Three months later, the illicit fee collection was suspended and dormitory policy changed. The company reimbursed over $800,000 to the nearly 300 workers.
As news of the workers’ victory spread, more and more workers contacted Niece for help.
“This movement starts with the workers, who are teaching each other about their rights,” he says.
In the last five years, Niece has helped workers file complaints of non-compliance with codes of conduct in over 40 factories in Taiwan, including companies that process food and make electronics, medical devices, apparel, bicycles, automotive parts and tools. That effort has led to reimbursement of more than $6 million in recruitment fees, over 600 bank accounts returned to workers, and more than 2,000 passports and other identity documents returned to their owners.
Charles Niece, the director of human rights and supply chain transparency, a Maryknoll project based in Taiwan, talks with workers as they leave work at a camera lens factory in Taichung, Taiwan. (Paul Jeffrey/Taiwan)
Yet as even as international buyers look closer at their suppliers and demand audits on code of conduct compliance, Taiwanese factory managers have resorted to cheating, Niece says.
“A buyer’s representative will come to interview workers, but the workers are sometimes given a script to read by their employer. And if they don’t know how to answer the question, they’re to respond, ‘The company where I work follows the labor law.’”
Niece rattles off examples of audit deception.
“In one case, the labor agency maintained two sets of bankbooks for the workers. In another, the agents began collecting fees in cash without receipts to avoid a paper trail,” he says. In another case, during a virtual audit, “the plant manager stood behind the video camera to ensure the workers only gave an authorized version of events.”
Empowering people to report abuse
One factory returned workers’ passports to them before an audit — only to snatch them back again afterward.
Fortunately, according to Niece, some corporate auditors aren’t easily fooled.
“In several cases we’ve helped facilitate off-site interviews between workers and corporate investigators, including at local convenience stores and the Tanzi Catholic Church. We’ve had corporate auditors come to the Maryknoll House in Taichung,” he says. “These for-profit multinational corporations are reaching out to the Church because we’ve built a genuine relationship with the migrant worker community.”
Niece believes that long term solutions to workplace abuse and worker mistreatment will only come as workers are empowered to speak up for themselves.
“Our role is behind the scenes, educating workers and helping them get connected. What’s the email address of someone in this corporation? What information do we need to send them to convince them to investigate? What techniques of audit deception should we watch out for? Because at the end of the day, it’s the workers who have skin in the game,” Niece says.
“Workers need to know what’s happening throughout the process and be confident of their ability to effect change,” he says.
Niece points to a ball bearing factory where forced unpaid overtime and physical beatings had been commonplace for years. Workers accepted the mistreatment as necessary to keep their jobs. But when a new worker was hired who had previously worked at a factory where Niece and workers successfully addressed grievances, he told his new coworkers that they didn’t have to suffer in silence.
The revolution that was born from a text
Gathering evidence was easy: the plant manager regularly texted workers ordering them to clock out and then continue working without pay. The workers saved those text messages. The factory settled out of court with a group of 13 workers.
“All that came about because of one worker, someone who lost their fear and convinced others to speak up for their rights,” Niece says.
“Many Filipino workers will put the company they’re working for in their Facebook profile. So I’d find all these people working in that company, and I’d cold message every one of them. Sometimes it was 100 workers, sometimes 300,” he says.
But change can take time, he says.
“One February I wrote several workers at a factory, but it wasn’t until four months later when a woman came back to me and said, ‘I’ve seen you before with Father Joy who is always talking about our rights. Can you really help us?’ And that’s how it began. Because that one woman responded, we now have a group chat with over 350 workers, and we’re making progress on addressing their concerns. Only one worker was willing to speak up. But that was enough,” Niece says.
Father Tajonera says even a single worker can spur change. He cites a text he received from a Filipina worker who was a liturgy volunteer in the Tanzi church.
“She sent me pictures of a new dorm. The beds were holes in the wall, like tombs they had to crawl into either head first or feet first, with no place to store their belongings. It was maybe acceptable for a few hours, but not a space you can live in for three years,” Father Tajonera says. “Those were the spaces for the foreign migrant workers, but the same dorm had rooms for Taiwanese workers that were much nicer.”
The priest continues, “So I immediately protested on Facebook. I said it was totally unacceptable. Many in the media and government in Taiwan follow me on social media, so the word got out quickly. The building owner came and tried to pacify me. The Philippines government labor office also tried to bargain with me so I’d stop making noise. But I said I would make sure that nobody moved into that building unless they changed it.”
The local church leading radical changes
Scores of workers gathered in the church to organize. They contacted factory owners and got commitments that they wouldn’t pressure their workers to move into the dorm. Finally, the building owner agreed to remodel the bedrooms, and the dormitory opened after a delay of more than a year.
“After more than 20 years of working in Taiwan with the migrants, we’re no longer crying out in the wilderness with no one listening. The government and the companies do listen,” Father Tajonera says. “But we have to continually push the envelope because they’ll inevitably try to go around us,” he adds. “Because of our advocacy and Charles’ work on supply chain issues, the employers now know that others are watching. We’ll help the migrants to see the possibilities for change.”
Niece has been named director of the Maryknoll Corporate Social Responsibility Office. Under the leadership of Maryknoll Father Joseph La Mar, who died in November of 2024, the New York-based office has for decades leveraged Maryknoll’s investment portfolio to dialogue with corporations about their business practices, collaborating with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility in many successful campaigns to protect the environment, advance worker justice and create more equitable global supply chains.
In Taiwan, Maryknoll’s efforts to raise workers’ voices continue to spread. Last year, Maryknoll hired a part-time Vietnamese worker to reach out to Vietnamese migrants, who are charged higher fees than Filipinos and are more likely to remain in Taiwan without a visa, leaving them susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous employers.
Meanwhile, a migrant worker who finished his contract in Taiwan took a new job in Hungary. Within days, he messaged Niece about conditions in his factory there.
Featured image: Charles Niece, the director of human rights and supply chain transparency, a Maryknoll project based in Taiwan, talks with workers from a troublesome factory, advising them of their rights under Taiwanese law. They met in the Tanzi Catholic Church in Taichung, which also serves as a shelter for migrant workers in crisis. (Paul Jeffrey/Taiwan)
