Labor union advocates yesterday condemned the Ministry of Education for allowing universities to use “study assistantships” to get around labor regulations.
Student organizers affiliated with the Taiwan Higher Education Union said that the special assistantships have proliferated since the ministry encouraged schools to adopt them last year, with schools bearing out activists’ predictions that the assistantships would be used to skirt labor standards.
Unlike other assistantships, “study” assistants are ineligible to be included in the national labor insurance system, the premiums of which are paid mainly by employers.
National Taiwan University Union secretary-general Tseng Chi-hua (曾稚驊) said the “study” aspect of the assistantships is unclear, with responsibilities identical to regular assistants.
“The school just tells you to fill out a simple form stating your study objective and that is enough to count you as a study assistant,” he said.
National Yang-Ming University labor rights working group activist Wang Wei-jen (王偉任) said that the special courses in which his school’s “study” assistants are required to enroll are not graded, with students also barred from counting the special courses as credits toward their qualifications.
Chen Ping-chuan (陳炳權), the union’s convener for National Taiwan Normal University, said that while university regulations state that students can choose between “study” and “labor” assistantships, the school administration has rigged the choice by mandating that “labor” assistants have to work at least four hours per day — more than double that of “study” assistants.
“While the Ministry of Labor has ruled that universities are covered by the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), this has not been fully implemented,” Taiwan Higher Education Union secretary-general Kao Shih-wen said, adding that the Ministry of Labor has so far failed to respond to the Ministry of Education’s “study assistantship” initiative.
Student advocates and schools have been engaged in a prolonged tug-of-war over labor standards after the Ministry of Labor last year ruled that the assistants were within the scope of the act.
Additional reporting by Lee Ying-chien
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,