The Ministry of Labor adjudication committee’s refusal to actively investigate labor disputes unfairly disadvantages workers, union members said yesterday at a protest outside of the Ministry of Labor, calling for the committee to develop a local investigative presence and to fully use its authority to demand access to factories.
About 20 protesters from the Taoyuan Confederation of Trade Unions and several other groups said that the current appeals system “tortures” workers and acted out a skit portraying the committee as a leash preventing workers from reaching “union protection.”
The ministry’s Improper Labor Action Adjudication Committee was established in 2011 as part of broader legal reforms to guarantee workers’ rights to organize.
Photo: Huang Pang-ping, Taipei Times
“After five years of implementation, we think there are a lot of shortcomings,” Taoyuan Confederation of Trade Unions chairman Chuang Fu-kai (莊福凱) said, blasting the committee for treating itself as a “court,” leading to dragged out cases and unfair burdens on workers because of the committee’s refusal to actively investigate complaints.
“The committee is not a court — it is a body established to help the ministry exercise its administrative discretion,” he said. “If you treat yourself as a court and require both sides to provide evidence, you are forcing them to use lawyers, which workers can not afford, putting them at a disadvantage.”
The committees positioning of itself as a court is self-defeating given that it was originally intended to help avoid drawn-out lawsuits, Chuang said, calling on the committee to embrace an active investigative enforcement role and make full use of its authority to demand access to factories.
Chuang also criticized the committee’s drawn-out review process, saying that many cases took up to five months to resolve, disadvantaging workers who were unfairly fired.
“Workers do not have any income if they do not have a job and that is very hard on families,” he said, adding that the process weakened unions by having workers who are fired arbitrarily having to face several months without an income.
The three-month window for filing suits is too short, he added, stating that workers often do not discover that their pay has been docked until several months after the fact.
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