Ministry of Labor officials yesterday announced plans to increase labor inspections, in an attempt to tackle a rising tendency of overwork among employees in knowledge-intensive industries, including the high-tech sector and the news industry.
Working many hours of overtime is commonly known as baogan (爆肝), or “liver busting,” a Taiwanese expression describing the phenomenon that is especially pronounced in the nation’s intensely competitive high-tech industry.
In a bid to better protect the labor rights of employees in the nation’s high-tech, media and financial sectors, ministry officials said the government plans to employ a total of 325 additional inspectors at regional labor departments around the nation before the end of next year, increasing labor inspections from covering 12,000 to 40,000 companies per year.
The move follows the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (職業安全衛生法) in July, which stipulates stricter regulations on night shifts and working hours with the aim to prevent cases of karoshi — a Japanese term that means “death from overwork.”
“In the past, labor inspections mainly focused on laborers on assembly lines, but now we intend to conduct more inspections on the labor conditions of white-collar workers,” said Lin Yu-tang (林毓堂), a division chief at the ministry’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Statistics from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics show that since 2011, the nation’s white-collar workers, especially those with graduate degrees, are more prone to suffer from longer hours of overtime than blue-collar employees.
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