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.
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