A new 24-hour toll free hotline has been launched recently to better serve foreign workers who need instant help or other assistance working in Taiwan, the head of the Cabinet-level Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) said Wednesday. The 1955 hotline, the pronunciation of which sounds similar in Chinese to the phrase 'it saves me,' is a service hotline free to all callers and reachable via cellphones, landlines or public telephones, CLA Minister Wang Ju-hsuan said. Wang said the 1955 hotline service program was launched after the CLA Employment and Vocational Training Administration conducted an opinion poll in which many responding foreign workers complained that there are too many 0800 free hotlines, all of which are 10 digits long and therefore difficult to remember. The respondents also complained that the 0800 hotlines are inaccessible during the night or on holidays, Wang added. The much shorter 1955 hotline is jointly operated by Chunghwa Telecom and the non-profit Garden of Hope Foundation. According to Chen Chien-chou, a Garden of Hope project manager, the hotline offers multilingual services in Tagalog, Thai, Bahasa and Vietnamese. The 1955 hotline service can also be used by employers of foreign workers and ordinary citizens who want to know more about employing foreign laborers or caregivers, Chen said. The service is estimated to have cost about NT$36 million (US$1.09 million) to establish and operate for the coming six months, as well as another NT$26 million to establish a hotline service operation center as well as personnel training, according to the CLA. In the past, the 0800 hotlines for foreign workers received an average of 70,000 calls per year, the council added. 