Taxi drivers from around the country gathered in front of the Council of Labor Affairs in Taipei yesterday to protest their low incomes and urge the government to restrict the number of cabs in the country.
Representatives of a taxi union said that in 2009, cab drivers were working an average of 270 hours a month and earning NT$71 an hour, according to statistics supplied by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
This was a huge drop from the NT$119 an hour that cab drivers earned in 1997, the union representatives said.
Photo: CNA
On average, taxi drivers earn less than NT$20,000 a month after paying maintenance, insurance and parking fees as well as fuel costs, which could amount to more than NT$16,000 monthly, union spokesman Chu Chin-hsin (朱進新) said.
This situation is “embarrassing” for middle-aged breadwinners whose teenage children might be earning at least NT$98 an hour — the minimum hourly wage — in part time jobs at convenience stores or gas stations, he said.
The soaring price of fuel, the increasing number of free shuttle buses and higher passenger volumes on the mass rapid transit all constitute a threat to the livelihood of cab drivers, Chu said.
The best solution to the problem is to restrict the number of taxis in operation, said Peng Chih-yuan (彭芝園), who has been driving cabs for more than 20 years. Increasing taxi fares would only harm the taxi driver business, he said.
Since the global financial crisis in 2008, there have been too many taxi drivers working and a decline in the quality of service, Peng said.
There are about 30,000 cabs in Taipei City and more than 90,000 throughout the country, according to the ministry’s figures.
As a result, the unoccupied rate is more than 80 percent on average, the figures show.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods