Lawmakers serving on the legislature’s Transportation Committee yesterday proposed that the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) be turned into a state-run corporation, which they think would be the best way to the resolve the labor disputes facing the railway agency.
The proposal resurfaced at the committee meeting, at which the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and the TRA were scheduled to brief lawmakers on how they would resolve disputes with workers.
Train drivers and train service personnel had threatened to strike during the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday last week if the TRA did not address a series of issues caused by a personnel shortage.
TRA statistics show that it is able to hire 14,548 people under the current budget, which was down 22 percent compared with 17 years ago. Passenger numbers have increased by 30 percent compared with eight years ago, and the number of train stations has risen to 226. The number of daily passenger and cargo train services has also increased by 10 percent.
The agency has 1,315 vacant positions left by employees who retired or resigned.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lee Kun-tse (李昆澤) said that 30 percent of new TRA employees leave their jobs soon after passing training tests and enter the agency, showing that the agency has difficulty retaining staff.
Grueling job requirements also discourage train drivers and railway maintenance from staying, Lee said.
“On average, train drivers drive about 43,000km per year, which is equivalent to driving around the nation 38 times. Each railway maintenance team now has only two workers, and there is no third person to watch out for approaching trains,” Lee said.
Apart from the poor work conditions, DPP Legislator Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津) said that the railway workers also have a salary system that is different from other government workers, with a lower starting salary and fewer benefits.
She said that the best solution would be to transform the TRA into a state-run corporation.
Yeh said that Minister of Transportation and Communications Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) had proposed the idea 16 years earlier.
The idea did not materialize because the Taiwan Railway Labor Union opposed it, as it said that TRA workers would be laid off if the agency was turned into a corporation. The union should no longer reject the idea, because several ministry departments have become state-run corporations, such as Taoyuan International Airport Corp, Taiwan International Port Corp and Chunghwa Post, Yeh said.
Both the Taiwan Railway Union and Taiwan Railway Workers’ Union oppose the privatization of the railway agency.
The unions said the key is to ensure that railway workers have the same salary scale and benefits as other government employees and can have a sound and safe work environment, which is what helps retain workers.
Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said that turning the TRA into a corporation does not mean that it has to be privatized, adding that there is still a long way to go before the agency could be privatized.
To become a corporation, the TRA would need to have sufficient workers, competitive salaries and upgraded infrastructure, Wang said.
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
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
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