Efforts to clear the Executive Yuan’s draft amendment to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) through committee reviews were delayed yesterday after Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Arthur Chen (陳宜民) and Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) filibustered a meeting for more than two-and-a-half hours.
The Economics Committee and Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee yesterday held a joint review of the proposed amendment.
Lawmakers across party lines filed a slew of motions ahead of the meeting, which were put to votes.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
The first motion, tendered by the KMT caucus, proposed that lawmakers be allowed to speak about revisions to the draft amendment that they have proposed for as long as they want and that Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lin Ching-yi (林靜儀), who chaired the meeting, must allow each lawmaker that has signed up to speak to speak at least twice.
Of the 24 lawmakers that attended the meeting, 10 voted for the motion, nine voted against it and five were not in the room, eliciting cheering and applause from KMT lawmakers.
The results appeared to startle the DPP caucus, which has a much larger representation on the two committees, with Lin and legislative officials taking a long time to count the votes.
DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) proposed that the motion be voted on a second time, drawing strong protests from KMT lawmakers, who said that Ker’s proposal violated legislative rules.
When Lin later left the podium for a short break, all KMT lawmakers flocked to the speaker’s podium and occupied it.
Ker denied that his proposal was in breach of legislative rules, saying that it is customary for motions to be reconsidered during plenary sessions.
However, seeing as he had lent his support to the proposal to let all lawmakers speak more than once earlier in the meeting, Ker said he would concede and retract his new proposal.
Subsequent motions that called for the Cabinet’s draft amendment to be returned to a plenary session for deliberation and for the DPP and the KMT to each hold an additional hearing on the amendment were voted down by a narrow margin.
The lawmakers continued to discuss motions to revise Article 24 of the act, which governs rules on workers’ overtime pay for work on off days.
DPP Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) submitted a motion, but was absent from the meeting.
The method she proposed for calculating overtime largely corresponds to the one under the current “one fixed day off, and one flexible rest day” policy, but addressed the calculation of overtime pay for the first four hours of work, whereas existing rules count overtime in blocks of four hours, up to a maximum of 12 hours.
Chiang filed a motion to retain the current rule that workers be paid 2.5 times their hourly salaries, while Chen filed a motion to pay workers twice their salaries if they are asked to work on their off days.
The Cabinet’s draft amendment stipulates that workers would be paid their regular hourly wage for the actual number of hours they work on off days.
Chen, who was the first lawmaker to speak about Article 24, spoke for about 30 minutes, reading pages of what he said was online criticism of the amendment before addressing his proposal.
Chiang, who spoke after Chen, was tipped off by KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Wei-chou (林為洲) that as soon as he finished speaking, the DPP caucus would file a motion to end discussions and put all motions related to the article to a vote.
After receiving the information, Chiang continued to speak about the amendment to stall the proceedings.
He went on for more than two hours without leaving the podium.
It was already past 5:30pm, when the session was scheduled to end, when Lin Ching-yi asked the other lawmakers whether they agreed to continue the meeting until midnight.
She broke up the meeting after a majority of lawmakers objected to the proposal.
The draft amendment is scheduled to undergo another review early next month.
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