The Executive Yuan has not given up on proposing a same-sex marriage bill this year, Premier William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday.
Lai made the remark at the legislature in Taipei in response to questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a proponent of legalizing same-sex marriage.
Saying that Germany in June passed a marriage equality bill to grant registered same-sex couples the same legal status as heterosexual couples, Hsu asked Lai when the Executive Yuan plans to put forward a same-sex marriage bill.
Asked whether he supports same-sex marriage, Lai said he does, adding that the Executive Yuan is working on a bill and has not ruled out submitting a proposal before the legislative session ends at the end of the year.
Lai on Tuesday told KMT Legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) that it would be difficult for the Executive Yuan to propose a same-sex marriage bill during the current session, which is focused on reviewing budget requests from central government agencies.
Lai yesterday told Hsu that the Executive Yuan is still discussing the bill’s details.
He said the Executive Yuan would follow Constitutional Interpretation No. 748 that was issued by the Council of Grand Justices in May and put forward a bill that is more likely to win the approval of most people.
The Executive Yuan would not delay moving the major policy forward, Lai said.
Later in the day, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) asked Lai why wages in the private sector have not increased, despite an economic recovery.
Exports have risen for 13 straight months; the TAIEX has stayed above 10,000 points for a record 98 days; and per capita GDP and foreign exchange reserves are expected to reach US$25,000 and US$45 billion respectively next year, Lee said.
However, the average salary last year, NT$46,422, was lower than that in 2000, NT$46,606.
Lai said it was because local industries are still in a transitional period, and exports have been heavily reliant on China, which hurt the nation’s trade.
Citing a survey released last month by online job bank yes123, Lee said that despite Lai’s hope that a proposed 3 percent wage hike for public employees would encourage the private sector to follow suit, only 7 percent of private companies surveyed said they would consider giving their employees an across-the-board raise.
The “serious problem” of Taiwanese being paid meager salaries is due in part to a lack of legal basis for separating their minimum wage from what foreign blue-
collar workers make, which averages just below NT$20,000, marginally below the legal minimum wage for Taiwanese, NT$22,000.
However, the work of foreign employees, many of whom are caregivers, and Taiwanese workers by and large are very different in nature, he said.
He called on the Cabinet to evaluate whether setting foreign workers’ minimum wage at NT$22,000 would pressure employers to raise salaries for local workers.
He urged the Cabinet to complete such an assessment by June next year, when the wage increase for public employees is set to take effect.
Lai agreed, adding that small and medium-sized enterprises are granted tax deductions if they raise employee salaries by a given margin.
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