The Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) is mulling whether to extend unemployment benefits under certain conditions, but the draft plan has already come under fire from labor representatives.
Council officials are in the process of drafting a plan that may extend unemployment benefits from the current six months to nine months when the unemployment rate does not decrease for four consecutive months and more than 3.5 percent of workers with labor insurance are involuntarily unemployed.
The plan would also extend unemployment benefits to 12 months for all workers in the event that the unemployment rate does not decrease for eight consecutive months and more than 3.5 percent of workers with labor insurance are involuntarily unemployed.
Current regulations stipulate that only workers aged 45 years or above are eligible to apply for unemployment benefits for nine months. All other workers are only eligible for six months of benefits after they prove they have been made involuntarily unemployed and are actively seeking a new job.
Son Yu-lian (孫友聯), secretary-general of the Taiwan Labour Front, criticized the plan, saying that if the council waits until the unemployment rate of those with labor insurance reaches 3.5 percent, that would mean the overall rate would have reached 10 percent.
“It would be too late to extend unemployment benefits then,” he said.
The number of people receiving unemployment benefits began to climb last September, when about 29,000 people were eligible. The numbers soared at the beginning of this year and peaked at 124,000. In June, the figure peaked again at 134,000, meaning about 2.4 percent of workers with labor insurance were unemployed.
Although the job market is in a trough, the jobless figure for June was still more than 1 percent away from qualifying for CLA’s proposed conditions.
Chu Wei-li (朱維立), president of the National Federation of Independent Trade Unions, urged government officials to draft better policies that would help create more jobs, so that workers would be able to find jobs to support themselves instead of having to rely on unemployment benefits that would eventually run out.
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