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.
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