The Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) should adhere to a single standard in reducing the penalties faced by union members who took a “legal holiday” during the Lunar New Year holiday, labor advocates said on Wednesday.
“The situation would be different if only dozens of people are given demerits instead of more than 300, because the agency would avoid facing public outcry while still ‘killing some chickens to scare the monkeys,’” Taiwan Railways Union president Wang Jieh (王傑) said, adding that the union is concerned that its officials will be targeted due to reports of irregular handling of demerit cancelations.
“Some people had their demerits canceled even though they did not request time off, while others who asked for time off did not have their demerits canceled,” he said, denying reports that the handling of the demerits was delayed until an evaluation committee meeting.
The case could set an important precedent for an increasingly active transportation sector labor movement. The combination of spikes in passenger numbers during holidays and workers’ legal right to take time off during holidays have caused unions to view “legal holiday” actions as a safer and easier way to pressure employers than strikes, which must undergo an extended approval process.
The Ministry of Labor’s adjudication committee last month ruled that union members who had requested time off a week before the holiday should not be considered “absent without leave.”
However, it declined to overturn the TRA’s disciplinary action against union members who requested time off later, while advising the agency to deal with them “leniently” and refrain from issuing demerits or docking salaries.
Wang said that the union would wait to see the handling of the demerits before deciding whether to take legal action against the committee’s decision.
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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