Poor implementation has dampened the effect of amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) mandating a 40-hour work week, union activists said yesterday, calling for stronger restrictions on overtime.
A household survey conducted by the Ministry of Labor showed that since the legal work week was cut by two hours in January, average weekly work hours fell to 43.15 hours for the January-to-April period compared with 43.53 hours in December last year, Taiwan Higher Education Union department director Lin Po-yi (林柏儀) said, attributing the muted effect to lax overtime regulations.
Compared with the same period last year, average weekly working hours between January and last month fell by roughly 0.8 hours, with the new mandate affecting about 40 percent of workers, according to ministry statistics.
“What is relevant is the effect immediately before and after the new rules came into effect — and that has not been substantial,” Lin said, adding that a gradual reduction trend in work hours before the new rules came into effect made direct month-on-month comparisons with last year misleading.
Ministry plans to cut seven national holidays following implementation of the amendments have been controversial, with the Legislative Yuan last month passing a resolution requiring the ministry to reformulate plans after activists said that loopholes in the new rules would lead to an overall sacrifice of worker interests.
Lin said that while ministry proposals to mandate an additional weekly day off on top of the existing mandatory holidays would discourage employers from spreading shifts over six days, it still would not address union concerns that the overall cuts in overtime rates would prevent the new rules from leading to a substantial reduction in working hours.
“If the ministry changes rules to mandate one official day off and one vacation day each, the amount of overtime pay people would be eligible for would actually drop,” Lin said. “You cannot use a new weekly vacation day as an excuse to cut national holidays.”
As act rules mandate that workers be paid for every day of the month — including days off — overtime pay is calculated based on a 30-day work month, leading to overtime pay that is only marginally higher than workers’ regular salaries, he said.
Low labor inspection coverage, coupled with weak unions and loopholes preventing act restrictions from being applied to certain jobs would also make it difficult to force substantial reductions of national working hours, he said.
Department of Labor Standards and Equal Employment Deputy Director Huang Wei-chen (黃維琛) said that seasonal differences in the industrial work cycle mean that it is still too early to know how much of an effect the mandate has had, adding that an average of three hours of weekly overtime was within an “acceptable range.”
While the union is correct that overall overtime pay would be cut under the formula, if the seven national holiday were eliminated, the ministry would mandate an additional weekly “vacation day,” he said, adding that the ministry is considering changes to the overtime pay formula.
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
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,
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