The Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) said yesterday that the Ministry of Examination will hold an examination to recruit new personnel for the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) by the end of the year.
Liao Cheng-tsun (
Liao added that the 540 employees in question did not include the 180 new railway maintenance workers requested by the TRA Labor Union.
"[The maintenance workers] are low-level employees," Liao said. "They do not have to be recruited through a national exam."
The ministry issued an official statement on the matter, saying that the same hiring practice also applied in other organizations within the ministry, including the Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau and the Directorate General of Highways.
The statement said the Executive Yuan had authorized the TRA to hire contractors if it had job openings but could not find qualified individuals to fill them. The TRA would be given more leeway to hire employees once it was reorganized into a corporation, the statement added. The ministry also suggested that the TRA reevaluate the number of employees it actually needs.
The statement also noted that the TRA has held at least three major examinations for new employees since 2002, and that the number of resignations was slightly higher than expected.
The statement was issued after the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported that the TRA would postpone its recruitment examination, a move which its labor union opposes.
Labor union chairman Chen Han-ching (
The union's secretary general, Wu Shing-wen (
"But we will not compromise on the proposal [to add another 180 railway maintenance workers]," Wu said.
After five railway maintenance workers died in an accident in Hualien in March, the Council of Labor Affairs came up with a number of practical measures to improve workers' safety. Recruiting additional railway maintenance workers was one of the council's suggestions.
Fu Huan-jan (
"It takes time to train [workers] and it will be difficult to do so if they are employed as contractors," Fu said, adding that his department would continue to discuss the issue with the TRA.
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:
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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