The Council of Labor Affairs is considering expanding the definition of death from overwork by not limiting it to the workplace.
Following a series of widely reported cases of workers — especially in the high-tech sector — dying suddenly after a prolonged period of excessive overtime, the council has been accused of not doing enough to prevent unscrupulous businesses and managers from literally working employees to death.
Council officials said the Bureau of Labor Insurance — which conducts an initial evaluation as to whether a worker died from overwork and is entitled to compensation — plans to remove a requirement that it only applies to death in the workplace.
This means that the sudden death of workers because of long-term job stress, whether they were at home, on the way to work, on business trips or at locations other than the office or workplace could still qualify as overwork, the bureau said.
The current requirement, which stipulates that cases of death from overwork must occur in the workplace, was one of the reasons why the council initially ruled that the death last year of Hsu Shao-pin (徐紹斌), an employee at Nanya Technology Corp, was not a case of overwork.
Hsu, 29, started working at Nanya in 2006 as an engineer and frequently worked overtime, sometimes putting in as much as 139 extra hours a month.
Before his death, Hsu had been putting in about 80 hours of overtime per month for half a year.
His parents found him dead in front of his computer at home on Jan. 11 last year.
Last month, the council said a second investigation had shown that Hsu’s death was the result of overwork.
Under fire from labor groups and lawmakers for being “too strict” about recognizing death from overwork, the council in the past months also introduced new measures such as extending the list of medical conditions linked to death from overwork.
The council also shifted the burden of proof onto employers, so that if an employer is unable to provide evidence that a worker has not been literally worked to death, the council would side with the employee by default.
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