About a dozen graduate students rallied outside the Ministry of Labor in Taipei yesterday, calling on the ministry to protect the labor rights of part-time research assistants.
Led by the Taiwan Higher Education Union, the protesters accused the Hsinchu City Department of Labor Affairs of neglecting reports filed by two National Chiao Tung University students in February.
The pair said the university regularly paid them late — sometimes by up to three months — and did not pay their labor insurance and pension premiums.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
Instead of investigating the case, Hsinchu’s labor department just conducted a “spot check” on the university’s working conditions for part-time assistants, which presented no results, union executive secretary Hu Ching-ya (胡清雅) said.
“Given the careless conduct of local governments in attempting to conceal such cases, the central [government] authorities should immediately intervene and perform a labor inspection at Chiao Tung University,” she said.
Chanting slogans, union members demanded that the ministry clamp down on similar alleged breaches of the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), saying that such violations were common in universities and colleges nationwide.
The protest was part of a campaign in which the union has filed reports charging academic institutions with violations of labor regulations every two months, starting in December last year.
Tzeng Fu-chuan (曾福全), a graduate student at Shih Hsin University in Taipei who earns about NT$5,000 a month as a teaching assistant, said he has filed reports against his school three times since December last year.
Shih Hsin and National Taiwan Normal University were recently fined by the Taipei City Department of Labor for late wages and failure to provide labor insurance for research and project assistants.
Controversy over the labor rights of part-time research assistants came to light during a high-profile legal battle between graduate students and National Taiwan University in 2013.
Althoug the university said the relationship between a teacher and a student should not be seen as employment, the Taipei High Administrative Court ruled that students should be considered school employees, and therefore were entitled to protection by labor regulations.
Union section leader Lin Por-yee (林柏儀) said the Hsinchu incident shows the ministry’s reluctance to pursue labor disputes when universities are involved, adding that a delay in wages at a private-sector company would have warranted swifter punishment.
Huang Chi-ya (黃琦雅), a senior speciality in the ministry’s Department of Employment Relations, said that the ministry would demand local labor authorities to conduct another inspection in relation to the alleged violations, and that the ministry would provide “administrative guidance” to local labor departments within a month.
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