The Taiwan Power Labor Union has no plans to strike over proposed changes to the Electricity Act (電業法), union officials said yesterday following a union congress after the Bureau of Energy announced several concessions to the union on Wednesday.
“I can say that at this stage we are not considering a strike. While we would not absolutely rule it out, there are other tools we can use,” union secretary-general Peng Chi-tsung (彭繼宗) said, adding that while his union was not “satisfied,” the four “consensuses” reached with the bureau on Wednesday were “acceptable.”
Following meetings with union and Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) officials on Wednesday, the bureau agreed to exclude privatization of the firm from any proposed amendments, divide energy transformation into two stages and allow the firm to establish a parent holding company, while allowing the establishment of subsidiaries only if workers’ rights and interests are not affected.
Proposed changes to the Electricity Act to divide the company and allow electricity producers to sell directly to consumers for the first time drew repeated strike threats from the union, which said the action would illegally profit private firms and threaten employees’ job security.
Because of continued uncertainty about the final amendments as they move through the Executive Yuan and Legislative Yuan, yesterday’s congress authorized union leaders to take a number of measures whenever “necessary,” including applying for mediation, holding talks with company officials, calls for “legal resting” and mobilized street protest, Peng said.
The union had threatened to instruct workers to “legally rest” on a typhoon day in protest of the amendments.
Peng said that the congress’ authorization amounted to granting it authority to call a strike.
Additional reporting by CNA and Lin Chu-han
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