The number of workers in Taiwan on unpaid leave fell in the first two weeks of the month as did the number of companies that asked employees to take time off, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Labor yesterday.
The mid-month figure for employees on unpaid leave was 4,377, down 1,060 from 5,437 at the end of last month, while the number of companies with workers on unpaid leave was down to 49, from 50 previously, the statistics showed.
The government releases unpaid-leave data on the first and the 16th day of each month.
The figures have drawn heightened attention in recent months as the economy has showed signs of slowing, largely because of falling global demand, leading struggling exporters to ask employees to take time off without pay to cut costs.
According to the ministry’s data, are more than 1,000 workers who have been on furlough since the end of September. The number topped 5,000 in the middle of last month and rose to a three-year high of 5,437 at the end of last month.
In the latest two-week reporting period, 13 employers ended unpaid leave programs, while 12 initiated them. Of the 49 companies adopting furloughs, most were in the export-oriented high-tech sector.
In the first 11 months of the year, exports fell 10.3 percent from the same period last year, largely because demand for high-tech devices has been on the decline. Several think tanks have trimmed this year’s economic growth forecast to less than 1 percent.
The number of furloughed workers from firms in the Hsinchu Science Park, one of Taiwan’s most important high-tech production hubs, remained unchanged from the end of last month at 109, Hsinchu Science Park Bureau data showed.
The bureau said three employers in the Hsinchu Science Park had workers on unpaid leave during the two-week period, also unchanged from previous data.
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