More than four-fifths of employers of foreign caregivers say they would be willing to offer their employees the minimum wage, a survey by the Council of Labor Affairs showed yesterday.
In July last year, the council polled more than 10,000 employers of foreign workers, 5,000 of whom employ foreign caregivers, to ask them about their attitude toward hiring foreign workers and the compensation and benefits given to their workers.
The survey showed that as many as 85 percent of employers were willing to pay foreign caregivers, who are currently exempt from the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), the minimum wage.
The current minimum wage is NT$17,880 a month.
GIVING A BREAK
The survey also showed 64 percent of employers believed that giving foreign caregivers a set amount of break time in a day was acceptable.
However, only 27 percent said they would be willing to give priority to Taiwanese over foreign workers when seekuing to hire at-home caregivers, which showed that most employers of caregivers still preferred foreign labor because of their relatively lower wages.
Officials said the survey showed that if the council proposed including foreign caregivers in the act and therefore having their salaries adjusted in accordance with the minimum wage, it would be widely accepted by most employers of foreign caregivers.
DAY OFFS
The absence of days off has long been on the list of complaints by foreign worker associations and labor groups.
Groups such as the Taiwan International Workers Association have said that failing to make it mandatory for employers to provide for caregivers to take certain days off amounted to legalizing the current practice of refusing to give foreign at-home workers days off.
The groups say foreign workers are at a disadvantage because they do not have any negotiating power and are not able to freely change employers.
Labor groups have also questioned why the nation’s labor standards do not apply to foreign workers, who they say are not treated like human beings with equal rights as domestic workers.
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
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
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