Forty-five companies have sent a total of 5,292 employees on unpaid leave so far this month, the highest number in three years, according to the latest statistics released by the Ministry of Labor yesterday.
It was the greatest number of people on unpaid leave in the nation since the end of December 2012, when 4,450 were asked by their employers to take time off without pay.
According to the ministry, the number of workers in Taiwan on unpaid leave has remained greater than 1,000 since Sept. 30, reflecting the nation’s sluggish economy amid slumping global trade demand.
Taiwan’s high-tech sector, which relies heavily on exports, has been among the sectors that have seen a slowdown in orders and a need to save money by having workers take leave without pay.
The Ministry of Science and Technology yesterday reported that 788 employees from three major high-tech hubs have been sent on unpaid leave this month, with 621 of them working in the Central Taiwan Science Park.
The Hsinchu Science Park and the Southern Science Park in Tainan also saw small upticks in furloughed workers to 109 and 58 respectively.
Chiu Chiu-hui (邱求慧), the official responsible for science parks at the science and technology ministry, said the three science parks might post negative growth for last month because of the lackluster global economy.
However, he said that the nation’s economy was moving in a better direction and he still saw a chance for the three science parks to report growth for the whole year.
The three science parks reported revenue of NT$1.13 trillion (US$34.22 billion) in the first half of this year, up 6.47 percent year-on-year, according to the science and technology ministry.
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