Premier Lin Chuan (林全) at a meeting in Taipei on Thursday asked the Ministry of Labor to improve its management of foreign workers so that there are fewer incidences of migrant workers going missing.
Lin told the ministry to increase the fines handed to recruitment agencies that fail to report missing workers or mistreat migrant workers by proposing an amendment to the Employment Service Act (就業服務法).
Lin also told ministry officials to look into other ways of improving the management of migrant workers.
As of the end of September, 53,561 migrant workers were listed as absent without leave, 31,185 women and 22,376 men, according to statistics released by the National Immigration Agency on Oct. 18.
That represents an increase of 925 on the figure for August, although migrant workers who are found to have left the nation are deducted from the total.
As of the end of September, 609,272 foreigners were employed as construction workers, factory workers, caregivers or in other manual jobs, statistics from the ministry showed.
That means 8.79 percent of migrant workers have gone missing.
Of the missing migrant workers, 26,429 are from Vietnam, 23,669 from Indonesia, 2,561 from the Philippines and 901 from Thailand, the statistics showed.
At the end of January last year, 43,688 migrant workers were listed as missing — the earliest figures available from the agency, with a further 9,873 going missing from January last year to September, which is an average of 494 migrant workers per month.
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