Promised “performance pay” for Taipei City government workers will not be implemented, with the city instead introducing a new evaluation system for departments, Research, Development and Evaluation Commission Chairman Chen Ming-shiun (陳銘薰) said yesterday.
While Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) had called for top-performing city bureaucrats to be rewarded using new “performance bonuses,” implementation of such a scheme would be overly complicated, as well as potentially unfair to employees if quantitative measures alone were used, Chen said.
Ko had called for the city to conduct individual performance appraisals using techniques borrowed from the corporate world.
Seventy-five percent of city employees are awarded additional end-of-year bonuses based on simple supervisor appraisals, matching the upper limit mandated by national law, Department of Personnel Deputy Director Chang Chien-chih (張建智) said.
Chen said that in lieu of new individual performance bonuses, the mayor’s office would assume greater control over the apportionment of normal year-end bonuses to collectively reward workers in top-performing departments.
While in the past the mayor’s office was only empowered to take away 1 percentage point of a department’s 75 percentage points worth of bonuses and transfer the amount to other departments, in the future it will take as many as 5 percentage points away from poorly performing departments, he said.
Chen said that departments’ performances would be determined based on calculations using scorecards borrowed from the corporate world, based mainly on the satisfaction of city residents and the reduction of waste and red tape.
Twenty-five percent of the score is to be determined based on sets of 25 “plus” and 20 “minus” factors, such as encouraging civic participation and employee publications.
Labor unions and business associations are to assign grades to the commissioners of the Department of Labor and Department of Economic Development.
Ko said that the new system would be piloted next month, with full implementation starting next year.
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