Acting Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (
"While poor management of foreign workers is not listed as a reason for the city government to cancel the contract with the company, we will ask the company to reshuffle its board of directors if serious flaws are found," Chen said yesterday after a city council meeting.
He also said that a reshuffle would be the "harshest punishment" that the city government had ever imposed on a private investor.
Seeking to silence accusations that it had dodged responsibility for the problem, the government has launched an investigation into the riot by Thai workers over alleged mistreatment by a management company.
The special committee of investigators will focus on the conditions of the Thai workers and the possible culpability of the MRT firm in its handling of foreign labor regulations. The report is due by the end of the week.
Chen said that if the city government is asked to take "administrative responsibility" for the riot, he would "happily bear the burden."
In an attempt to prevent similar disputes between foreign workers and management from happening again, Chen ordered the labor department to commence inspecting all Kaohsiung-based companies with more than 100 foreign laborers, even if the sites where they work are outside the city.
Chen said that Kaohsiung-based Formosa Plastics Corp, for example, has more than 4,800 foreign laborers who are currently working in Mailiao Township (麥寮) in Yunlin County.
"As long as the employer is based in Kaohsiung City, the labor department will keep an eye on its management of foreign laborers by seeking the cooperation of local [site] superintendents," he said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift