With the exception of doctors all healthcare workers are to be paid overtime from tomorrow under the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法)
The health workers were previously not protected by the working hours regulations of the act, instead conforming to an article within the act which states that these employees may “arrange their own working hours, regular days off and national holidays through other agreements with their employers.”
A growing number of nurses and other healthcare workers have protested what they called the hospitals’ abuse of manpower.
“Once the healthworkers adjust back to regular working hours, they are required to be paid overtime wages when working overtime,” Council of Labor Affairs official Huang Wei-chen (黃維琛) said. “They will also be protected by the regulation on the maximum number of overtime hours, which is 46 hours a month.”
Under the act, regular working hours are not to exceed eight hours a day and 48 hours every two weeks, and the combined regular hours and overtime in a day may not exceed 12 hours.
The council said some healthcare workers, including technicians and medical personnel working in hemodialysis units, radiotherapy units, blood banks and respiratory therapy rooms have already been covered by the regulation since March last year.
The rest, which include those working in emergency rooms, operation rooms and intensive care units, are to go onto regular working hours from tomorrow.
The Taiwan Radical Nurses Union has played down the changes, citing a worrying drain on the numbers of nurses, the little hope of compensation for past grievances, such as the example of hospitals keeping nurses on call, counting the hours as “regular” rather than overtime.
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