Winds of Change: Can Taiwan’s Offshore Wind Deliver Fair Work Too?

Taiwan is rapidly expanding its offshore wind sector as part of a broader push for clean energy. While offshore wind barely existed a decade ago, today Taiwan is the largest offshore wind market in Asia outside China.

Hundreds of offshore wind mills now line Taiwan’s west coast, with local factories behind many of the the steel giants – each weighing around 1,000 tonnes, rising more than 100 meters above the sea, and anchored nearly as deep below the waves. Migrant workers at some of these manufacturers say they incurred heavy debts to pay recruiters for their jobs, raising the risk of debt bondage as they worked to pay them off. Some interviewees also described additional indicators of forced labor, including withheld wages, deceptive recruitment, and intimidation and threats.

Workers should not have paid recruitment fees at all. Across every offshore wind project examined in this investigation, suppliers were required (by some of the involved entities) to ensure that migrant workers did not pay recruitment fees. However, years of audits and compliance programs apparently failed to notice the ongoing practice.

Denmark has been a central partner from the start. Widely regarded as a global wind leader, it is home to two of the world’s major renewable energy developers – Ørsted and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) – which stand behind several of Taiwan’s largest offshore wind farms. Together, those projects account for most of the island’s 4 gigawatt installed capacity.

Almost all of Taiwan’s offshore wind turbines are supplied by Denmark’s Vestas – the world’s largest turbine manufacturer – and Germany’s Siemens Gamesa, the world’s largest offshore turbine maker.

Building offshore wind farms from scratch is capital-intensive. To make projects viable, governments in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, England, Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea provide billions of dollars in debt guarantees through national export credit agencies.

This is not only an investigation into the gap between corporate policies and practice, but a story about how the gap can be bridged when civil society and public authorities work together. Sometimes, a single case is enough to spark change.

High Fees and Withheld Wages

Several of Taiwan’s largest offshore wind farms have their underwater foundations made by Century Wind Power, a subsidiary of Century Iron and Steel. Every day, hundreds of migrant workers are shuttled on company buses from a dorm with security in Taoyuan, surrounded by farmland, to a restricted section of Taipei’s port. That setup makes it unusually hard to approach workers safely, but the buses can’t squeeze down the narrow lanes leading to the dorm, and during morning and evening shift changes workers walk the last stretch. That’s when we approached them.

“I borrowed everything to pay the recruiter’s $5,300 fee. My family had no savings.