The Cabinet yesterday approved an amendment to the Teacher Education Law (
"Whether teachers should be granted the right to strike has been controversial in Taiwan. Given the lack of consensus, we have decided not to allow it," said Ke Jeng-feng (柯正峰), executive secretary of the Ministry of Education's Education Research Committee.
Ke hailed the amendment for including a new chapter on the negotiation and mediation process, which teachers can use when labor disputes arise.
Ke made the remarks at a press conference after the weekly Cabinet meeting.
The amendment, however, was criticized by the National Teachers' Association, a nationwide organization composed of teachers' associations around the country.
Liu Chin-hsu (劉欽旭), secretary-general of the association, said he suspected that the law was changed to hinder a proposed amendment to the Labor Union Law (工會法).
Activists in support of the right to strike for teachers have been pushing for a revision of Article Four of the Labor Union Law, which denies government employees, teachers and munitions industries the right to strike, but the amendment is still pending approval by legislature.
"Today we made progress in agreeing to exclude teachers from the article, but the Cabinet's amendment to the Teacher Education Law apparently runs counter to that," Liu said.
Liu said negotiations on the article, attended by lawmakers across party lines sitting on the legislature's Sanitation and Environment and Social Welfare committees, were held yesterday, and giving teachers the right to organize trade unions was accepted by all.
According to the consensus reached in the negotiation, teachers would be allowed to organize trade unions on condition that the right to strike be postponed for a year.
"We agreed to temporarily put off the right to strike to facilitate the amendment to the Trade Labor Law, but that doesn't mean the Cabinet should deprive teachers of their right to strike, as stipulated in the amendment to the Teacher Education Law," Liu said.
Liu said it was also regrettable that the amendment to the Teacher Education Law also denied teachers the right to organize trade unions and the right to collective bargaining, which, together with the right to strike, make up the three basic labor rights.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods