Former freeway toll collectors said they would camp outside the Ministry of Transportation and Communications building in Taipei on Sunday next week to wait for job openings in the ministry’s agencies.
Meanwhile, about 40 people were involved in protests yesterday, demanding that the government meet the workers’ employment needs.
Half of the protestors were students supporting the former toll fee collectors, organizers said.
Photo: Chen Chi-chu, Taipei Times
Four of the students managed to gain access to a conference room in the building where Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuan-shih (葉匡時) was presiding over a forum attended by aviation industry representatives and students.
The students were removed from the conference room by police officers and security personnel as they demanded government-provided jobs for the former toll collectors.
Yeh apologized to the forum for the disruption.
“We understand how the former toll collectors feel and hope that they can rationally express their opinions... However, it looks like those who stormed into the conference room were not former toll collectors,” Yeh said.
“We hope they talk with the National Freeway Bureau and consider whether they are doing the workers a favor or harming their chances of finding new jobs,” he added.
The former toll collectors at the protest said that the bureau claimed it has no job openings for them, but it has arranged new jobs for toll collection station managers.
In response, the bureau said that people who held managerial positions at the toll stations are civil servants and can be legally transferred to different government jobs.
However the toll collectors are government contractors, who are not eligible for such reassignment.
The former toll collectors became unemployed after the nation launched a distance-based collection system earlier this year, in which all the manual collection booths were removed.
Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co (FETC), the contractor administering the electronic toll collection system, is bound by its contract with the National Freeway Bureau to find jobs for staff who were laid off by the bureau because of the change to the system.
Statistics from the bureau showed there are 942 toll collectors, with 456 of them having accepted job openings provided by FETC.
As of yesterday, 242 were in FETC-provided jobs, with 212 still waiting. Despite the job openings offered by FETC, some workers refused to go to the interviews and insisted that the bureau find jobs within the ministry for them.
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
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
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