Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) officials were left embarrassed at the legislature yesterday when none of them could provide a clear answer to lawmakers’ questions on which industries and workers would be affected by the economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA).
CLA Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) and other council officials came under fire during the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee meeting when lawmakers fired questions at her about recent events.
Wang and other officials yesterday tried to downplay the Kaohsiung City Government’s refusal to make service staff at its employment center memorize government ECFA promotional material designed to enable them to better answer questions such as whether the signing of an ECFA will cause unemployment to rise.
However, when Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國) asked council officials to raise their hand if they knew what effects the ECFA would have on the nation’s various industries and workforce, no hands went up.
“What gives the CLA the right to order employment center service staff to memorize material about the ECFA if CLA officials themselves don’t even know it?” Liu asked.
DPP Legislator Huang Sue-ying (黃淑英) also criticized the council for promoting the ECFA at a time when there is still no consensus over the signing of the agreement.
“Workers who visit the employment centers are looking for [a job that puts] food on the table. You can’t just paint them a picture of a bowl of rice,” she said.
In defense of the council’s policies, Wang said that the council was not seeking to further its own interests or to pick a fight with the Kaohsiung City Government, but to ensure workers understand how signing the ECFA could potentially impact them.
“As civil servants they [employment center staff] are responsible for informing workers about how the government is preparing to help them to deal with the potential adverse effects of free trade,” she said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,