Protests were staged early yesterday morning outside the president’s residence and the Presidential Office Building by a group of young labor rights campaigners upset by the government’s proposal to cut seven national holidays.
The protests came just hours after a marathon 13-hour review session at the Legislative Yuan on Thursday that lasted until 10pm before proposed amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) were sent on to the Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committe.
Labor groups staged a sit-in for about an hour outside President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) residence before moving to near the Presidential Office Building.
Photo: CNA
They called on Tsai to stop the amendments that would reduce national holidays from clearing the legislature.
Presidential Office spokesperson Alex Huang (黃重諺) said the proposed amendments are being processed in the legislature and different views are to be respected.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government’s proposed amendments to the Labor Standards Act call for reducing number of national holidays from 19 to 12 and “one flexible rest day and one fixed day off” every seven days, which are to accommodate the change from the schedule of 84 working hours over a two-week period to a 40-hour workweek passed during former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration.
Labor groups and opposition parties are against the reduced holidays and the “one flexible rest day and one fixed day off” proposals, saying “rest days” could easily be used by the employers as extra working days because they are not like “fixed days off,” which under current regulations do not allow working except for circumstances such as natural disasters and emergencies.
The amendments would lead to an increase in total working hours, they say.
The committee resolved to have most of the amendments discussed in additional cross-caucus negotiations before being put on the legislative floor agenda for final readings.
The New Power Party (NPP), which had insisted on “two fixed days off” every seven days, on Thursday altered its motion to propose allowing working rest days with better overtime pay and guaranteed overtime compensatory leave.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers continued to insist on “two fixed days off,” while Minister of Labor Kuo Fong-yu (郭芳煜) said that the “one rest day and one day off” system would be more flexible than the “two fixed days off” schedule.
Motions to amend Article 37 concerning the number of holidays were also sent for negotiations, but at the request of KMT lawmakers, the committee conducted a vote, with seven DPP lawmakers voting for a reduction while three KMT lawmakers and one NPP lawmaker were against it.
Other motions that need cross-caucus negotiations include one to increase the penalties for employers’ violations such as failing to pay minimum wage and overworking employees, which were deemed too lenient to deter employers from choosing to pay fines instead of abiding by the law.
A few amendments were passed without further negotiations, including a resolution that workers should be granted at least a full 11-hour rest period between shifts.
DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) on late Thursday said that he expects the amendments, including those that require cross-caucus negotiations, to clear the legislative floor before the end of the year.
Additional reporting by CNA
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