Council of Labor Affairs Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) told lawmakers yesterday that wages were likely to return to pre-crisis levels by the end of the year.
The Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee questioned Wang about the unemployment rate and if it would drop below 5 percent by the year’s end.
Directorate General of Budgeting, Accounting and Statistics’s figures showed that 153,000 people quit their jobs in August because they were not happy with their positions, she said. The figure — an all-time high — was an indicator that people were more confident of finding better jobs, she said.
“During the financial crisis, people were afraid to quit to seek better jobs ... Now the economy has gradually recovered, there are more jobs, which means that workers who quit their jobs have more options and are more likely to find jobs with better pay and benefits,” she said.
In 2007 and 2008, the average monthly salary was NT$44,000, which slipped to NT$42,000 at the height of the financial crisis, while the average from January to July this year was NT$46,000, she said.
The willingness of businesses to expand their workforce also contributed to a positive job outlook for the year, she said.
Lawmakers asked her about protecting sex workers’ rights as the Ministry of the Interior moves to decriminalize the sex industry. She told Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) that if prostitution became a legal profession, the council would protect prostitutes’ rights.
When Wu asked whether decriminalizing the sex trade would have a positive impact on employment figures, Wang said no.
“Under current societal norms, a person is unlikely to admit that he or she is a sex worker, so it would be difficult to come up with meaningful statistics,” she said.
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:
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