The Taipei City Government yesterday announced that it would hold Uber Eats and Foodpanda accountable if they fail to report injuries or accidents involving their contracted drivers within eight hours of an incident.
Delaying a report contravenes Article 37-1 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (職業安全衛生法), and is punishable by a fine of NT$30,000 to NT$300,000 (US$976 to US$9,765), the Taipei Department of Labor said.
Labor Inspection Office head Chiang Ming-chih (江明志) said that Uber Eats and Foodpanda have delivered lists of their employees, records of previous deliveries and wages received to the division.
The department would go through the records and discuss whether the two companies’ operations abide by the law.
If they are found to have subjected their employees to illegal working conditions, the companies could each face a fine of up to NT$1.75 million, the department said.
The government is looking into the work environment in the food delivery sector after Foodpanda and Uber Eats couriers died in traffic accidents on Thursday last week and Sunday respectively.
Couriers are employees rather than contractors, which means that the two companies would have to provide their workers with labor insurance and issue compensation for any work-related accidents, the Ministry of Labor said on Monday.
However, on Tuesday both companies said that they have no intention of changing their business models.
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