President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) should apologize for his failure to improve the salaries of private-sector workers and the general labor environment during his time as president, as more than 9 million workers celebrate International Workers’ Day today, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers said yesterday.
Under Ma’s leadership, wages for private-sector workers have dropped to the level they were at 14 years ago, making Taiwan one of the few countries in which workers’ average salaries decreased between 2007 and last year, DPP Legislator Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津) told a press conference.
As bad as the wage situation is, the deterioration of Taiwan’s labor environment is an even more serious concern, Yeh said.
A total of 38 workers died from being overworked last year, meaning that a death from overwork occurred every 10 days on average, she said.
Data also showed that on average, more than 100 occupational accidents occured each day between 2009 and last year, with the annual number of deaths from such accdints in the same period ranging from 281 and 319.
Private-sector workers are also unhappy when they look at their futures under the government’s current pension reform plan because they would receive a monthly retirement payment from the Labor Insurance Fund which is lower than the monthly state subsidy given to low-income households, Yeh said.
DPP Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) said that blue-collar workers were not the only ones who had to deal with increased hardship, as white-collar professionals are also suffering from being overworked and earning low incomes.
Lin said the government and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) were avoiding enacting the legislation required to improve labor conditions.
DPP Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) urged Ma to work on narrowing the income gap between private-sector workers and civil servants — who received a 3 percent pay raise two years ago and enjoy a better retirement package — before social divisions worsen.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,