A senior Cabinet official said yesterday that the government can create an additional 3,966 short-term jobs by year’s end and an additional 12,800 short-term jobs next year.
Minister Without Portfolio Tsai Hsun-hsiung (蔡勳雄) made the announcement at a press conference after a Cabinet meeting on unemployment convened by Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄).
The announcement came one week after President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said he wanted to see the Executive Yuan expand its job-creation plans.
The job opportunities to be created by government agencies will bring the number of short-term jobs created by a job-boosting measure this year from 46,000 to about 50,000 and the number of short-term jobs created by that measure from 56,000 to 69,000, Tsai said.
With the expansion of the measure, the Ministry of Education will create 4,000 jobs for out-of-work teachers to teach in after-school programs in elementary schools and junior high schools. The National Youth Commission will help 1,950 young adults start their own businesses, and the National Science Council will create 2,000 positions for post-doctoral researchers.
The measures have drawn controversy as the short-term job recipients include young people who are to be conscripted by the Ministry of National Defense and those who are to join substitute military services managed by the Ministry of the Interior.
When asked whether the job-boosting measure would help middle-aged people and seniors who have greater difficulty finding jobs, Vice Chairman of the Council for Economic Planning and Development San Gee (單驥) said the council would continue to review the program to ensure that it serves the special needs of these people.
Aside from the measure, the government said that it expects to create some 200,000 job opportunities through a four-year job creation plan and another 200,000 job opportunities through a four-year NT$ 500 billion project to increase public construction works.
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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