The basic labor rights of social workers, such as vacations, working hours and salaries, has been ignored for too long and there is no better time to voice the concerns than Social Workers Day, rights groups and a lawmaker said yesterday.
“The loving hearts and dedication of Taiwan’s social workers have been exploited and abused. People rarely think that the people who take care of the underprivileged need to be taken care of as well,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) said.
Taipei Social Workers Union director Huang Ying-hao (黃盈豪) said 74.3 percent of social workers in Taiwan work overtime without pay and 76.3 percent were not given annual leave, as required by law.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
They were also asked to work on weekends, work long hours and donate part of their salary to the social welfare institutions they work for, Huang said, adding that some workers are contracted on an annual basis.
“Benevolence is a heavy cross to bear for us and a lot of people take it for granted. The mindset also contributes to social workers’ overworking because they don’t allow themselves to say they are tired,” Huang said.
Taiwan Labor Front -secretary-general Sun Yu-lien (孫友聯) said those longstanding issues remained unresolved.
In some ways, Sun said, social workers do the work of the government, which has outsourced many social welfare projects.
“The solution to this issue takes more than increasing the number of personnel. Social workers are workers too and they are entitled to enjoy all the basic rights other workers enjoy,” he 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:
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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