Amid public misgivings about the growing number of companies asking workers to take furloughs, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said the government was ready to take several measures, including institutionalizing guidelines for leave without pay.
“We want it to be put into law,” Ma said at a meeting with leaders of top labor groups on Monday.
Workers, employers and industrial officials and academics will be invited to participate in the process to revise the law, he added.
The government will also step in early and give proper assistance, including free vocational training, he said.
“The ‘recharge for a new start’ program also hopes to help workers get an opportunity to develop other special skills,” Ma said.
With workers most concerned about their right to work, Ma said the government would encourage people under 45 who are having trouble landing a job to return to school to pursue a second specialty.
Vocational training subsidies will be increased from the current NT$50,000 over three years to NT$70,000. For people over the age of 45, the government will prohibit age discrimination in the workplace and provide counseling on starting their own businesses.
Ma told the labor union leaders that with the global economic crisis hitting soon after he became president, his priority since then had been to create jobs, especially after the jobless rate soared to a high of 6.13 percent in August 2009.
“The unemployment rate has fallen to 4.3 percent as of last month, but we’re still not satisfied. At least the number of employed people has increased by 350,000 over the past three years and five months,” Ma said.
On the rights of workers, Ma said the law currently caps working hours at 84 hours every two weeks, but the government hopes to reduce that to 40 hours per week with two days off to allow people to take care of both family and work.
The government will also seek to protect workers from occupational injuries by strengthening the responsibility of employers and establishing a rehabilitation center for workers suffering from such injuries.
In response to Ma’s new labor policy, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokeswoman Kang Yu-cheng (康裕成) accused Ma of reneging on most of the labor-related promises he made four years ago.
The government’s official figure for people on unpaid leave is 5,513 workers at 48 enterprises, but the private sector has reported 36,400 people from 75 enterprises on furlough, Kang said.
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