About 82 percent of employees who responded to a survey said the government should establish a subsidy or holiday for people working outdoors during the summer, online job bank yes123 said yesterday.
The company surveyed 1,356 employees and 860 employers about working outdoors in hot weather, spokesman Yang Tsung-bin (楊宗斌) said.
The results showed that 66.8 percent of respondents work outdoors between June and August.
Respondents said they would be willing to work outdoors for eight hours per day if they were given an extra NT$2,885 on average per day, the poll found.
According to the poll, 82.3 percent of the employees said the government should establish a high-temperature subsidy, while 69.5 percent said it should implement high-temperature holidays.
However, only 26.7 percent of the employers supported a high-temperature subsidy, while 18.6 percent supported holidays, the survey found.
Asked whether such a subsidy and holiday is possible, Department of Labor Standards and Equal Employment Director Hsieh Chien-chien (謝倩蒨) said the Ministry of Labor is collecting information on the subject, but did not give a timetable.
Employers should protect workers from heat injury during the summer, Occupational Safety and Health Administration Secretariat Director Lin Chiu-miao (林秋妙) said, giving the example of reducing labor-intensive work at noon.
The issue is brought up every summer, she added.
People with high blood pressure, heart disease or liver or kidney problems have more health risks and should not work outdoors in hot weather, she added.
The poll was conducted between June 14 and Thursday through random sampling without targeting any specific industries and has a confidence level of 95 percent, yes123 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:
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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