Academics and labor activists yesterday said that in the three years from 2006 to last year, the number of temporary and dispatched workers in the country rose by as much as 169 percent and pointed to the mass hiring of such workers by government agencies as the main culprit.
Addressing a forum organized by Taiwan Thinktank, panelists called on the government to stop setting a bad example by hiring temporary and contract workers and proposing laws that only exacerbate the current situation.
Contract, temporary and dispatched workers are grouped under the category of atypical labor and have recently been used as a popular belt-tightening measure by businesses and the public sector, allowing them to increase manpower while minimizing costs associated with worker salaries, benefits and liabilities.
Liu Chin-hsin (劉進興), convener of Taiwan Thinktank’s social and humanities group, said conservative estimates showed that the central government hired 3,974 dispatched workers in 2006, a figure that last year grew 43 percent to 5,686. The total number of dispatched workers also increased from 126,000 in 2006 to 339,000 last year, a 169 percent increase.
“The government mistakenly believes that flexibility is unavoidable, that temporary and dispatched labor is the key to creating employment and economic prosperity,” Taiwan Labor Front secretary-general Son Yu-lian (孫友聯) said. “However, employers that aim to minimize labor costs by choosing flexibility are doing so at the expense of the welfare of workers who are the most disadvantaged and marginalized.”
Taiwan Labor and Social Policy Research Association executive director Chang Feng-yi (張烽益) said the large income disparity the nation was already experiencing would only worsen if the government proceeds with plans to create a “wide-open door” for companies seeking to hire dispatched workers.
The Council of Labor Affairs, which held hearings recently to discuss a proposal to amend the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) that would include regulations and restrictions on the use of contract and temporary workers by businesses and hiring agencies, has proposed changes including capping the percentage of a company’s contract workforce at 3 percent. However, a firm would still be able to hire contract workers totaling up to 20 percent of its total workforce provided it receives union approval and a majority of employees are union members.
The changes would also prohibit hiring contract workers in certain industries such as the medical, security, airline, marine, public transportation and coal mining sectors.
Labor experts said the council’s list of industries that are not permitted to use contract labor effectively gives all other companies a green light to legally hire such workers, which may cause a large increase in non-standard employment across a wide variety of industries and more exploitation. They called on government officials to put a stop to such worker exploitation.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,