Over 2,000 trade union members are set to converge on the Legisla-tive Yuan today to ask President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) administration and legislators to reconsider the government's drive to privatize state-run companies.
The protest, organized by the Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU), is scheduled to start at 10am this morning.
Union workers from across the nation are expected to congregate at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial in Taipei and arrive outside the Legislative Yuan at 11am.
The protesters plan to call for representatives from each legislative caucus to sign an agreement that they will support the TCTU's three demands.
The demands are, first, that the government stop privatization procedures for the nation's remaining 18 state-run companies and start negotiations with the unions represented in the federation before making plans to release the companies' stock on the market; second, that the government enter into a written agreement with the unions before privatizing the companies; and third, that the government respect the operations and management of the country's state-run companies and refrain from interfering in their affairs.
The TCTU said that the possibility of a hunger strike to force the issue would not be excluded if the legislative caucuses refused to sign the agreement.
The privatization of the nation's state-run companies has been a touchy issue for the Chen administration. Since the passage of the Statute Governing the Privatization of State-Run Enterprises (
Of those 31, 17 are now out of business, a union representative said yesterday.
"From previous experience, we can see that it's not necessarily true that privatization is good for companies. Most of the state-run companies are making profits and are doing well on their own. A-bian [Chen] should remember his promise to us last February that he would not `privatize for the sake of privatizing,'" Chunghwa Postal Workers' Union president Tsai Liang-chuan (蔡兩全) said yesterday.
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