More than 300 Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) employees are to be punished for going on strike during the Lunar New Year holiday, the TRA said.
The strike was launched by the Taiwan Railway Union (TRU) in protest against a personnel shortage that has been plaguing the agency for years.
The union defended its action, saying workers were legally entitled to take the Lunar New Year holiday off.
TRA Director-General Jason Lu (鹿潔身) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee that 331 employees are to be punished for being absent on the days they were scheduled to work, based on a resolution made by the agency’s disciplinary committee.
Of the total, 235 are to be given one major demerit each for missing more than two days of work.
Six are to receive two minor demerits for missing two work days, and nine are to be given one minor demerit for missing one work day.
The penalties were determined based on the guidelines on rewards and punishments for civil servants, but the union still lodged a complaint against the TRA with the Ministry of Labor, Lu said.
“We have yet to make an official announcement on the punishment because the Act for Settlement of Labor-Management Disputes (勞資爭議法) stipulates that employers are banned from taking actions that would harm employees while labor and management are still engaged in arbitration. We can only approve and announce the decision when the arbitration is finished,” he said.
Although the union has argued that members had requested to take the Lunar New Year holiday off before the holiday began, Lu said the agency had also sent out two official notices reminding employees to show up for work based on the work schedule.
The union has accused the agency of suppressing its activities using improper means, but its complaints were not about the punishment, Lu said.
If the employees do not accept the penalties, they can seek administrative remedies by appealing to the Civil Service Protection and Training Commission, he added.
“The TRA director-general disregarded workers’ anger over the work schedule, which forces people to overwork. He did not even consider reforming TRA’s work-shift system after a major freeway bus accident that killed 33 people last month. Instead, he kept telling people that the TRA would severely punish employees who went on strike. He also showed contempt of the law by announcing the decision of the disciplinary committee before the arbitration is over,” the union said.
While Lu reiterated that TRA employees should follow the agency’s work rules and have a duty to serve the public, he has disregarded passengers’ safety by letting employees overwork, the union said.
The union said that all the 337 cases it had submitted to the labor ministry were about the TRA’s rulings against its employees for being absent from work.
Lu should retract the punishment while they are waiting for the decision by the labor ministry’s arbitration committee, the union said, adding that the agency and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications should not oppress its workers like a demanding, but cheap employer.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift