Accompanied by members of the Youth Labor Union 95, a former part-time employee of the Control Yuan, who asked to be identified only by the surname Chen, yesterday accused his former employer of violating the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
“I started working for the Control Yuan in May last year, but realized only in March that the Control Yuan did not list my name under the labor insurance coverage until October,” Chen told reporters at the group’s headquarters in Taipei.
Employers are required by law to register employees for labor insurance and pay part of their fees.
“I told my superior that they may have violated the Labor Standards Act on April 1, but they said that they didn’t know about the regulations and would check and get back to me,” Chen said. “So far, I haven’t heard anything.”
Besides the labor insurance issue, Chen said that the Control Yuan had never paid him for overtime or for working on public holidays.
Youth Labor Union 95 executive member Liu Yu-hsueh (劉侑學) said that the Control Yuan owed Chen for unpaid overtime and for working on holidays.
Chen also said that the Control Yuan had asked all its part-time employees to sign a set of regulations with clauses that violated the Labor Standards Act.
“My supervisor, a senior Control Yuan secretary named Wang Hsin-hsien [王新憲], handed the regulations to us, asked us to sign on the spot, and called our names one by one to turn in the signed paper,” Chen said.
“When I refused to sign it right away and told him I needed some time to go over it and think about it, he said that those who didn’t want to sign didn’t need to come to work the next day,” he said.
A copy of the regulations that Chen showed at the press conference said the Control Yuan could “terminate employment at any time if [the part-time employee] does not follow the rules, performs poorly or shows a bad attitude toward assignments given by a Control Yuan employee.”
The regulation also required part-time employees to give two weeks’ notice before resigning.
“This is obviously illegal,” Liu said. “The Labor Standards Act specifically lists conditions in which an employee can be fired, and none of the situations in the [Control Yuan] regulations meet the conditions in the law.”
Liu said the act only requires an employee to tender his or her resignation 10 days in advance.
Wang rebutted all the accusations when contacted by the Taipei Times.
“We give [part-time employees] more severe regulations because we want them to follow the rules, but if they don’t, we won’t handle it according to our own regulations. We’ll still follow the law,” Wang said.
He denied having told Chen not to come to work the next day if he didn’t sign the regulations.
“As for the labor insurance issue, I think there’s a misunderstanding, but I’m not too sure exactly what happened,” Wang said, adding that he would investigate the matter to find out what went wrong.
Liu said that they had reported the case to Taipei City’s Department of Labor.
“They will send people to the Control Yuan to investigate by Monday at the latest,” he said.
China has reserved offshore airspace in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported yesterday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. These alerts, known as Notice to Air Missions (Notams), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert is
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
More than 6,000 Taiwanese students have participated in exchange programs in China over the past two years, despite the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) “orange light” travel advisory, government records showed. The MAC’s publicly available registry showed that Taiwanese college and university students who went on exchange programs across the Strait numbered 3,592 and 2,966 people respectively. The National Immigration Agency data revealed that 2,296 and 2,551 Chinese students visited Taiwan for study in the same two years. A review of the Web sites of publicly-run universities and colleges showed that Taiwanese higher education institutions continued to recruit students for Chinese educational programs without
RSS