The Taipei City Government yesterday gave a NT$300,000 fine to China Airlines for discriminating against shorter people with a height requirement for flight attendant applicants, and failing to change the recruitment advertisement after receiving warnings.
The airline violated the Employment Service Act (就業服務法) by running an advertisement on its Web site in April recruiting 92 flight attendants that required female flight attendants to be at least 160cm tall and males at least 170cm, Taipei City’s Department of Labor Affairs said.
The department convened an employment discrimination committee on Thursday to discuss the case and determined that the airline’s requirement constituted workplace discrimination and violated labor laws.
Chen Yeh-shin (陳業鑫), commissioner of the department, said the airline canceled the height restriction on May 21 during the first-round interviews and instead asked applicants to touch the overhead compartments as a test, but it failed to remove the height requirement in the ads.
“The airline would not violate the act by demanding interviewees to touch the overhead compartments as a requirement. Setting up a height requirement and denying some people the opportunity to apply for the positions is discrimination,” he said yesterday.
The company had defended the requirement by saying the crew had to be tall enough to reach the compartments.
Chen said the company would be given 30 days to file an appeal.
Yesterday’s case made the company the first airline to be fined for setting up a height requirement for flight attendants since the act was amended in 2007 to ban requirements concerning birthplace, height, weight, appearance and age.
The department yesterday also fined Seasons Hotel Group NT$100,000 for firing a middle-aged female worker in May last year for wearing glasses.
The hotel required all female workers to wear contact lenses, but did not require male employees to do so.
The worker, surnamed Su, filed a complaint with the department last year. Chen said the committee on Thursday determined that the hotel violated the Gender Equality in Employment Act (性別工作平等法) by setting up unfair requirements targeting female workers.
The hotel yesterday argued that Su was fired for her poor language ability, and said it would file an appeal.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000
RSS