Working parents and teachers yesterday called on the government to amend current labor and education regulations granting paid leave when parents need to attend their children's school activities.
Working Parents' Alliance vice chairman Tsai Yuan-chen (
He added that many working parents, however, fail to attend because asking for a leave usually costs them a day's pay as well as affects their year-end bonus.
Taipei Teachers' Association president Ke Wen-xian (
He told the Taipei Times that there is usually only one Parents' Day each semester and granting parents paid leave for the day is only a mild investment in education.
Taoyuan County Teachers' Association president Peng Ju-yu (彭如玉) said at the occasion that parents would be able to take better care of their children's educational needs if they were given the right to participate in their education.
The alliance's policy department director Chen Chu-po (
The act, which first took effect in 1995 in California and later was expanded to include licensed day care centers and kindergartens in the legislation in 1997, gives parents, grandparents and guardians paid leave of up to 40 hours a year or eight hours a week.
Different states offer different ceilings for paid leave.
"We believe that family background, social status and the parents' occupation should not influence the educational resources their children receive," Tsai said.
"White-collar parents and working parents have the same rights to participate in children's education," Tsai said.
The alliance said it would give an impetus to proposed amendments to the Labor Standards Act (
Cheng Lai-chang (鄭來長), a senior executive officer of the Department of Elementary and Junior High School Education, and Adam Hsieh (謝青雲), a section chief at the Department of Labor Standards, said at the conference that the two government agencies would adopt a positive attitude toward the proposed amendments.
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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