Former Freeway Toll Collectors Self-Help Organization protesters clashed with police outside Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) headquarters in Taipei yesterday, accusing the party of breaking promises to immediately address their case following January’s elections.
More than 80 former workers and activists gathered outside DPP headquarters, shouting that DPP president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) had failed to fulfill pre-election promises to immediately establish a special task force to draft a plan to respond to their demands. Activists briefly tussled with police officers guarding the building’s entrance before plastering slogans onto the building’s sides.
“We are all waiting and we have been waiting for more than two years, so we do not want to see further delays for any reason,” organization president Sun Hsiu-luan (孫秀鑾) said. “We demand the DPP fulfill everything they have said and promised.”
Photo: Su Fang-he, Taipei Times
The toll collectors lost their jobs after national highways began using electronic toll collection system in 2014.
She said that meetings of a task force to address their case had yet to be called, despite previous promises by Tsai to establish the task force immediately after January elections, adding that the DPP had also failed to fulfill previous promises to arrange jobs for the former toll workers with DPP-
controlled local governments.
National Alliance for Workers of Closed Factories member Wu Jing-ru (吳靜如) accused DPP Legislator Chung Kung-chao (鍾孔炤), who has been tasked with heading the task force, of putting off meetings on the grounds that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications had been slow in providing task force members with the full text of the workers’ original contract.
“The DPP has stated for years that they care about our case and they have also helped us in the past. How it can be possible that they have no legislator or other representative who truly understands our issue? Our demands have never changed,” she said.
While the contract is relevant to worker demands that the government compensate them for any salary differences between any new employment and their previous positions, other demands, such as restoring workers’ lost seniority in the national pension system, would not require consulting the text, Sun said.
Labor activist Kuo Kuan-chun (郭冠均) said the DPP should not use the task force to string along activists, adding the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) had previously established a committee of labor academics to address the issue only to see the committee fail to issue a list of concrete recommendations.
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:
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