The Taiwan National Congress (TNC) party yesterday urged the government to remove restrictions on employing foreign domestic helpers in view of the growing demand for such workers.
There is a high demand for caregivers and family helpers, but the terms for hiring eligibility are too strict, said Chen Chia-chun (陳嘉君), chairwoman of the TNC and wife of former Democratic Progressive Party chairman Shih Ming-te (施明德).
As both parents in more than half of the country’s families work, the government should allow easier access to foreign help, said Chen, a TNC legislator-at-large candidate in the Jan. 14 elections.
Under the current regulations, families that wish to obtain the services of foreign caregivers must meet either one of two requirements.
The first is a family member who is medically certified as requiring 24-hour care. The other is that a family member has mental or physical disabilities as specified in nine categories (including people in a vegetative state, or suffering from Alzheimer’s, autism, motor neuron diseases or Parkinson’s disease, etc).
Physician Hsu Ta-fu (許達夫) said the Barthel Index, which the Council of Labor Affairs uses to determine whether a family qualifies to obtain the services of a caregiver from abroad, is difficult to apply in certain medical situations and sometimes does not reflect the true condition of a patient.
As of the end of October, there were 196,755 foreign domestic helpers in the country, most of whom were from Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mongolia, according to the council’s data.
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:
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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