Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday refused to blame his lawmakers for the failure to block new amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), but urged the KMT caucus to continue to speak for “the grassroots” in the legislature.
Wu made the remarks on the sidelines of a Taipei news conference held by the KMT’s youth division a little more than an hour after the amendments cleared the floor yesterday morning after days of intensive protests inside and outside of the Legislative Yuan.
Several KMT lawmakers bowed to apologize to workers after the bill passed its third reading.
Photo: CNA
The amendments relax the limit on the number of consecutive work days from six to 12, raise the maximum monthly overtime hours from 46 to 54, and shorten rest time between shifts from 11 hours to eight for certain industries.
Asked if the KMT, as the largest opposition party, failed to perform well during the hours-long review of the bill, which had begun on Tuesday afternoon, Wu said: “I could not say so.”
“When the KMT enjoyed a majority in the legislature, we never resorted to a heavy-handed approach and always respected the voices of minority groups,” Wu said, adding that the nation had been peaceful and prosperous under the leadership of a reasonable ruling party.
However, now the KMT only holds 35 of the legislature’s 113 seats after one of its lawmakers was suspended after being convicted of graft, Wu said, referring to KMT Legislator Chien Tung-ming (簡東明), who was sentenced in June last year to five-and-a-half years in prison for vote-buying.
“That is why the KMT caucus cannot turn the situation around at the legislature, but party lawmakers must speak for those who are at the bottom of society,” Wu said.
“That way, even though we might not win in the legislature, we stand a chance of winning back voters’ hearts and possibly the year-end local elections and the 2020 presidential race,” he said.
Expressing regret that the amendments failed to achieve social fairness, Wu said a minimum of eight hours of rest was a basic human need, but workers could now end up getting only five hours sleep per day if their commute times were factored in.
The Democratic Progressive Party caucus, despite its majority, should not have forced a bill that could aggravate the problem of overwork through the legislature, Wu added.
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
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
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