Representatives of a public television temporary workers’ union yesterday accused the government of leading the way in creating an environment where both the public and private sectors “exploit workers through the use of outsourcing contracts.”
“There are more than 200 temporary workers” at Taiwan Broadcasting System (TBS), accounting for 20 percent of its workforce, Hsu Chung-fong (許純鳳), a representative of the TBS Dispatch Workers’ Union, said at a press conference in Taipei.
TBS network, which includes the Taiwan Public Television Service (公共電視), Hakka Television Service (客家台), Taiwan Indigenous Television (原民台) and Chinese Television Service (華視), was supposed to only outsource jobs related to supporting staff functions in the planning section or other sections outside of TBS’ core departments, according to TBS’ management regulations on temporary workers, Hsu said.
“However, in most cases, TBS hires temporary workers for jobs such as journalists, TV broadcasting anchors, assistant program directors, production assistants, animators, administrative staff and other regular television network positions,” Hsu said.
“This is a clear violation of TBS’ own management regulations on contract workers,” she said.
Since these 200 workers were hired on a different basis from regular employees, it has created an unfair situation, with people doing the same work for lower pay.
“Moreover, temporary workers cannot seek promotions or a pay raise,” she said, adding that they are not eligible for incentives such as “lottery drawings for an employee parking space.”
Outsourcing is just a pretext for the exploitation of workers, she added.
Liu Chang-de (劉昌德), an associate professor at National Chengchi University’s College of Communication, lent his support to Hsu’s contention.
“TBS says its principle is to give voice to the weak and underprivileged in society, but it is doing the opposite by exploiting its workers,” Liu said.
In response, TBS chairman Shao Yu-ming (邵玉銘) said after a board meeting that the board had decided to create an ad hoc panel to work on “normalizing conditions for temporary workers.”
One-on-one meetings with 157 TBS temporary employees will take place over the next three months, Shao said.
“The wages of temporary employees will remain the same until March next year. After three months of negotiation between the two sides, adjustments will be made to their wage scale and other benefits,” he added.
Additional reporting by Lin Yi-ju
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