Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) yesterday appeared to backtrack on plans to extend the period during which the unemployed may receive benefits.
With the jobless rate surging, the council has been under pressure to revise the Employment Insurance Act (就業保險法) to extend unemployment benefits from six months to one year — one of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) campaign promises.
During a question-and-answer session at the legislature last Friday, Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) told lawmakers the Cabinet would announce its position on the matter by today.
But at a press conference yesterday after the Cabinet’s weekly meeting, Wang said that Liu had promised to discuss how to make unemployment benefits more comprehensive and not to make a decision on extending the period.
Wang said the Cabinet would refer its draft amendment to the Act to the legislature by today so it could be reviewed alongside the version jointly proposed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators in January.
While refusing to give a direct answer, Wang suggested that the proposal to extend unemployment benefits to nine months or a year was inappropriate at present.
But middle-aged unemployed workers may soon qualify for up to nine months of benefits if lawmakers pass a separate amendment that is already out of its legislative committee, Wang said.
Ma’s election promise was not to extend unemployment benefits to one year, but to establish a system of criteria that would determine when the government can offer extended benefits based on economic conditions, she said.
“Once this system [of criteria] is created, the campaign promise will have been met. The CLA will make it happen within Ma’s four-year presidential term,” Wang said.
The jobless rate, the total unemployed population and the average number of weeks a person remains unemployed must be factored in to the period of unemployment benefits, Wang said.
She said that in 1992, an unemployed worker remained jobless for an average period of 32.44 weeks, and there were 105,000 people out of work.
“Now the average jobless period is 26.07 weeks and the unemployed population is 87,000,” she said.
Wang said the government would also study the systems for unemployment benefits in South Korea and Japan.
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