The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Taipei City Chapter yesterday said it plans to revoke Tsai Yi-shan’s (蔡宜珊) membership following allegations that the Taipei city councilor nominee-hopeful violated the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) by paying her assistant less than the minimum wage.
Tsai’s assistant allegedly received less than NT$22,000 per month, a report by the Chinese-language Mirror Media weekly said.
Tsai paid her assistant less than the minimum wage and violated the Labor Standards Act, DPP Taipei City Chapter director Huang Cheng-kuo (黃承國) said in a statement.
Photo: Chung Hung-liang, Taipei Times
She has severely diverged from the DPP’s philosophy of protecting worker’s rights and interests and damaged the party’s reputation, Huang added.
Tsai has been a party member for less than two years and would therefore be ineligible to run for city councilor as a DPP nominee in any case, he added.
The DPP Taipei City Chapter said it would investigative the case and seek verification from Tsai’s assistant.
It is also to forward its findings to the DPP’s Central Evaluation Committee to determine a penalty and revoke Tsai’s party membership, the chapter said.
Tsai dismissed the allegation, saying in a statement that her assistant, nicknamed Kua Kua (呱呱), received a monthly salary of NT$40,000 and that Kua Kua joined her campaign team last year and asked to work part-time.
As the campaign had not yet begun and was only in pre-campaign preparation, the Bureau of Labor Insurance and the National Health Insurance Administration told her that there were no relevant regulations for processing labor insurance, Tsai said.
According to the Ministry of Labor Web site, campaign team members belong to an uncategorized group of employees to which the act does not apply, Tsai added.
She has not yet been elected a city councilor and thus the local representatives’ assistants’ category, which the ministry says the act is applicable to, does not include this scenario, Tsai added.
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