The Youth Labor Union 95 announced on Youth Day yesterday that the government's planned labor policy revisions still did not provide young workers enough protection against exploitation.
Since the beginning of this year, the labor union has received more than 30 complaints from workers across industries and job functions regarding disputes over workers' being forced to pay penalties to terminate work contracts, the group's executive member Tzeng Hsiang (曾翔) said.
The government recently proposed amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) that would put a cap on the minimum number of years worked at a company and the penalty paid in the event that a worker terminates a work contract prematurely.
However, the union said that though it recognized the proposed amendments were meant to help protect workers, even if they were passed, there would still exist many gray areas that allow companies to take advantage of vulnerable workers.
“Many businesses exploit workers who are eager to start work by requiring them to sign contracts that are extremely unfavorable to them because the contracts require workers to pay high penalties if they do not agree to things such as putting in overtime,” Tzeng said.
Lin Chia-ho (林佳和), an assistant professor of law at National Chengchi University, said labor regulations in Japan and South Korea prohibited employers from issuing penalties to workers who don't fulfill their contracts to protect workers from exploitation.
The union urged the government to use Japan and South Korea's experiences as a reference and to prohibit employers from penalizing workers for terminating their work contracts prematurely.
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