KMT Legislator Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) yesterday slammed the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) for exploitative labor practices, after train conductor Chang Ming-yuan (張銘元) on Saturday last week allegedly died due to overwork.
She made the remarks during a review of the Ministry of Labor’s budget by the Legislative Yuan’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee.
The TRA later in the day released a statement and a copy of Chang’s duty roster for the month, which showed that he worked an average of six hours and 40 minutes per day and took regular days off.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
While the national railways’ shift arrangements are legal, they do not appear reasonable, Minister of Labor Lin Mei-chu (林美珠) said, adding that the Executive Yuan is working to increase the TRA’s staff, but the efforts would need time to bear fruit.
Last year, when lawmakers were discussing the amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), the TRA publicly opposed legal requirements that workers be given at least 11 hours of rest between work rotations, Lee said.
“If the government is leading the charge, making bad changes to the Labor Standards Act and allowing the TRA to boss its employees around, how can we expect the private sector to arrange fair shift schedules?” Lee asked.
The labor ministry’s Institute of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health has been absent from the ongoing deliberations on labor law amendments, she said, adding that it should have been an important reference for policymaking.
Lee proposed freezing about one-third of the institute’s NT$22 million (US$734,803) budget for research on “work balance and friendly occupational environment” and “labor and employer relations and labor conditions,” in addition to a separate NT$2 million cut.
Lin said the labor ministry had reviewed railways’ duty roster and found that while it met legal requirements, it is still unreasonable to TRA employees.
After the ministry discussed the issue with the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, the Cabinet ordered the TRA to increase its staff to reduce the burden on individual employees, Lin said.
However, newly hired railway employees need to pass tests and complete training, slowing down the pace of improvement in the railways’ work conditions, she said.
KMT Legislator, Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安), the committee’s convener this week, ruled that ministry officials must resolve their differences with Lee and other lawmakers before the budget review can move forward.
Additional reporting by CNA
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods