The Taoyuan Flight Attendants’ Union yesterday said it would adjust its demands to resume negotiations with EVA Airways as a strike by the airline’s flight attendants entered its seventh day.
“The union is open to discussing the amount of increase in per diem and is willing to make adjustments to the ‘anti-free rider’ clause,” it said in a statement.
The union would also not insist on having a seat on the company’s board as long as the airline allows it more participation in management and increases the transparency of operations, it said.
Photo: Chou Min-hung, Taipei Times
The statement came after EVA set down new conditions to resume talks with the union. The airline has not made any concessions since the strike began on Thursday last week.
The airline on Tuesday told a news conference that it would not continue negotiations unless the union adjusts its demands and sends a new version in writing.
The union’s demands include raising the hourly layover allowance from NT$90 to NT$150, increasing flight attendants’ rest time between shifts for some one-day round-trip flights, limiting the benefits that the union had earned to just its members, allowing union representatives to join the airline’s disciplinary committee and being represented on its board.
The union would collect opinions from all of its members on how to adjust its demands and draft a new version today, union member Chu Chia-yun (曲佳雲) told other members on the picket line outside EVA headquarters in Taoyuan’s Nankan (南崁).
“If you want to fight to the end, please show us your determination, but if you want this to be over, and you think this is just about dignity, the union can also accept that,” she said.
Asked about EVA’s plan to help striking flight attendants apply for new passports so that they can immediately return to work, union member Lee Ying (李瀅) said the company appears to have tried doing so for 30 attendants.
“To apply for a new passport, they first need to annul their existing passport. The flight attendants have signed a contract agreeing to place their passports under the union’s care, so the passports are neither lost nor invalid,” she said, adding that EVA’s approach to the passport issue should be condemned.
Despite the prospect of having to make further concessions, the union received a morale boost when Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) visited the picket line.
Yu urged the union to “stay strong so that you can have equal leverage when negotiating” with the company.
She has been following the strike for days, and decided to visit them after seeing the upper management’s uncompromising attitude and authoritarian thinking, she said.
Yu was the second lawmaker to visit the striking union members in Taoyuan.
DPP Legislator Chung Kung-chao (鍾孔炤) visited them on Monday.
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