The legislature yesterday passed an amendment to the Protective Act for Mass Redundancy of Employees (大量解雇勞工保護法) which will restrict employers from leaving the country when they have violated the law.
The amendment stipulates that employers would be subject to travel restrictions if they close their business but fail to provide workers with salaries due or redundancy money.
Council of Labor Affairs Chairman Lu Tien-lin (盧天麟) said the amendment would protect the rights of laborers and prevent employers from filing for bankruptcy and ignoring their obligation to take care of their employees.
The amendment also stipulated that contract workers should also be protected under the law.
The legislature also passed amendments to the Budget Act (預算法) and Financial Statement Act (決算法) yesterday, demanding that private foundations whose initial capital was made up of more than 50 percent of government money should send their annual budget and financial statements to the legislature for review.
Private foundations that were established with money left by Japan following the Japanese colonial period would also be required to do the same, the amendment states.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) said there were 172 private foundations established using government money, which totaled more than NT$126 billion, and those foundations should be monitored by the legislature to prevent them from misusing their budgets.
Meanwhile, the legislature also drafted an amendment to the Statute Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (兩岸人民關係條例) which proposes allowing selected banks to exchange Chinese yuan.
Exchanging Chinese yuan and New Taiwanese dollars is currently only permitted on Kinmen and Matsu.
While the pan-greens and the pan-blues failed to reach a consensus, the Democratic Progressive Party did not oppose the amendment being sent for review.
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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