People First Party Legislator Chen Yi-chieh (陳怡潔) and Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) have proposed an amendment to the Gender Equality Employment Act (性別平等工作法) to extend family care leave for labor from seven days to 10 days, including five days of paid leave like that of civil servants.
The lawmakers said regulations permitting seven days of non-paid family care leave to take care of family members in cases of serious disease or major accidents is far different from the five days’ paid leave of a total of seven days of family care leave given to civil servants.
The bill states that, according to a 2013 survey of the Child Welfare League Foundation, 63 percent of parents think that seven days of family care leave is insufficient, and that children catch an average of 4.6 colds per year, with each cold taking about 5.1 days to recover from, accounting for more than 20 sick days per year.
The proposed bill also states that as the nation lies in a seismic zone and experiences many typhoons, victims of major disasters, such as the major earthquake in the Tainan area earlier this year and Typhoon Morakot in 2009, need a long time to reconstruct their homes and need more days off work.
A total of 18 legislators across party lines have signed the bill and pushed it forward for review at the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Yan-hsiu (李彥秀) also proposed an amendment to the act, requiring companies with more than 150 employees to provide breast-feeding rooms and childcare facilities. Companies that fail to conform to the act would face a fine of between NT$300,000 and NT$1.5 million (US$9,244 and US$46,225).
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