The Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) yesterday said the most frequent type of employee rights abuses in the nation’s electronics sector involved work hours violations.
Last month, the council conducted surprise inspections at 30 high-tech electronics manufacturers and found a total of 62 labor violations.
A majority of the high-tech companies (24) that were subjected to the on-site inspections were found to violate labor regulations pertaining to working hours, council officials said.
Of these violations, 13 cases (19 percent) involved illegally long work hours, followed by 10 violations of employees’ work records (15 percent), seven cases of unpaid overtime (12 percent) and seven cases of violations related to work leave (12 percent), the council said.
Council officials said there were severe cases of poor working conditions. In one example, a company was allowing pregnant workers to work from 10pm to 6am, which is against the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
All the companies that violated regulations will be fined or given warnings, the council said.
“Generally, there were many instances of high-tech companies overworking their employees,” Council of Labor Affairs Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄). “The results of the inspections show that there is still room for improvement in terms of how Taiwanese employers abide by labor regulations,” she said.
The issue of poor working conditions at Taiwanese firms, especially electronics manufacturers, made headlines recently after several cases of engineers dying at young ages from alleged -overwork were reported.
Cases of death from overwork rarely receive labor insurance compensation because it is difficult for courts to conclude with any certainty that the death was a result of long working hours.
The death of a 29-year-old engineer at Nanya Technology Corp early this year triggered criticism from lawmakers and labor activists, who said the council was doing nothing as the nation’s workers were being “worked to death.”
The man, surnamed Hsu (徐), began working at Nanya in 2006 as an engineer and frequently worked overtime — as much as 139 hours a month. Before his death, Hsu had been putting in about 80 hours of overtime each month for half a year. His parents found him dead in front of his computer at home on Jan. 11.
Despite signs that Hsu died from being overworked because of his high-stress work environment — leading to cardiac arrest in a young and healthy adult — the court said the death was unrelated to his occupation.
In that case, the council was accused of turning a blind eye to hazardous work environments and the near impossibility of getting fair compensation for overwork-related deaths under the current system.
Labor groups have repeatedly urged the council to allocate more resources for inspections of work-related injuries and improvements in work environment safety.
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