Job opportunities for local farmers are the top concern of the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA), although the Council of Agriculture (COA) is assessing whether the country needs to import foreign laborers to work in the domestic agriculture sector, CLA Chairman Lee Ying-yuan (
Speaking at a legislative committee in response to questions from lawmakers, who expressed doubts about the COA's proposal, Lee said that the COA was still studying the possibility of introducing migrant workers to the nation's agriculture sector, based on the domestic labor market situation and a quota management system.
The CLA will stick to its stance that Taiwanese workers' rights and interests must not be affected before responding to the COA's initiative to import foreign workers to help address a labor shortage in local farming villages, Lee said.
During the legislative committee meeting, some lawmakers expressed skepticism that the CLA would be able to follow its own quota restrictions, as it has decided to further open the domestic labor market to foreign workers at a time when there are already about 320,000 alien laborers in Taiwan.
The CLA decided last month to allow up to 20,000 foreign laborers to be imported into certain "dangerous and dirty" manufacturing industries over a six-year period starting from next month. The council has estimated that the number of foreign workers in Taiwan may increase by 5,000 to 10,000 next year.
Secretary-general of the Yunlin Farmers' Association Lin Chi-chang (
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching