The Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) said yesterday that it would soon review its policies on foreign labor in an effort to safeguard job opportunities for Taiwanese and ensure protection of their rights in the current economic environment.
In a statement yesterday, the council said that its policy on the recruitment of foreign workers was predicated on the nation’s unemployment rate, the labor shortage rate and the demands of domestic industrial development as a whole.
UNEMPLOYMENT
The council said that with the unemployment rate continuing to climb, it was closely observing the national employment situation and would give priority to Taiwanese workers for employment opportunities and good labor conditions.
In view of recent violations by businesses that have exceeded their legal quotas for hiring foreign workers, the council said that it would strengthen its random examinations of businesses and be on the lookout for major changes in the number of foreign workers hired.
PRIORITIES
The council said that the current policy of admitting foreign workers cannot be allowed to have a negative impact on labor conditions and job opportunities for Taiwanese.
To this end, it said it would look at current procedures for recruitment and management of foreign workers, promote employment services and provide vocational training for Taiwanese to help them weather the unemployment crisis.
The basic principle behind the council’s policies will be to ensure that foreign workers do not rob Taiwanese nationals of job opportunities at home, said Tsai Meng-liang (蔡孟良), director of the council’s Foreign Workers’ Administration.
The council said that there were 365,000 foreign workers in Taiwan as of the end of March, which represented 3.5 percent of the nation’s total working population.
Among the foreign workers, 198,000 worked in the industrial sector while the rest worked as caregivers.
Most foreign workers in Taiwan come from Southeast Asian countries, such as Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. Many work in so-called “3D” jobs — dangerous, dirty and difficult.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY SHELLEY HUANG
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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