Premier Lin Chuan (林全) yesterday said that Minister of Transportation and Communications Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) had sought to resign to take responsibility for the bus crash in Taipei on Monday last week, but said that accountability should only be discussed after investigations are completed and improvements are made by the government.
Lin said that Tourism Bureau Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉) and Directorate-General of Highways Director-General Chen Yen-po (陳彥伯) — who on Sunday tendered written resignations — were not asked to resign, denying accusations by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers that the two were asked to resign to “keep Hochen in office.”
KMT Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) at a question-and-answer session in the legislature repeatedly called Hochen “shameless” and demanded his resignation “after 59 deaths in seven months.”
Huang Yao-cheng, Taipei Times
Twenty-six people died in a bus fire attributed to the driver’s suicide in July last year, while 33 died in last week’s crash on a freeway offramp connecting the Chiang Wei-shui Memorial Freeway (National Freeway No. 5) to the southbound lanes on the Formosa Freeway (National Freeway No. 3) in Taipei’s Nangang District (南港).
Lai accused Hochen of calling the driver in last week’s crash “indecent,” amounting to passing the buck to a dead man.
Hochen denied making the comment, prompting Lai to cite newspaper reports.
“You should base your questioning on facts rather than media reports,” Hochen said.
Lin denied Lai’s accusations that the government “passed the buck [for the bus fire last year] to Chinese tourists and the administration of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).”
“We did not blame Chinese tourists; [Lai’s] remarks are irresponsible,” Lin said.
The phenomenon of “integrated travel services” — where travel services such as hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops are all owned or invested in by a conglomerate — is in need of inspection, but pointing that out cannot be called a criticism of Chinese tourists, Lin said.
Minister of Labor Lin Mei-chu (林美珠) responded to accusations that she defined bus drivers’ work hours to be only when their hands were “on the wheel.”
Asked by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chao Tien-lin (趙天麟) to expand on the definition, Lin Mei-chu said that according to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), working hours are those during which employees are under the supervision of their employers at the workplace or places where the company operates.
“Rest time is when a worker is free from the employer’s supervision and can do as they please,” Lin Mei-chu said, but added that individual cases would have to be looked into separately to determine whether they constituted working hours.
When asked on Friday last week whether driver downtime during a tour — when tourists are not using the bus — should be counted toward working hours, Lin Mei-chu said that time when a bus driver is not restricted by the employer, “when they could take a walk, stretch or listen to music,” is not considered working hours.
In related news, DPP Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) asked whether the Cabinet is poised to make more changes to labor regulations after passage of the “one fixed day off and one flexible rest day” rules.
Business leaders claimed to have secured a promise from President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to tweak the new regulations after complaining about negative effects on their industries, Lin Chun-hsien said, citing a media report.
Tsai did not agree to the proposal, the premier said, adding that the government would continue to facilitate communication with industries and that so far there is no plan to change the labor laws.
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
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
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,