The Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) yesterday signed a collective agreement with the Taiwan Railway Labor Union after nearly 30 years of negotiations.
The agreement was signed by TRA Director-General Chang Cheng-yuan (張政源) and union chairman Chang Wen-cheng (張文正), with Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) and Minister of Labor Hsu Ming-chun (許銘春) serving as witnesses.
The agreement, signed following 300 rounds of negotiations, is a landmark moment for the railway industry and the union, Lin said, adding he was honored to witness the event.
Photo: CNA
The two parties would become official partners following the agreement, he said.
“The problems related to salaries, paid leave or other personnel issues might not be resolved overnight, but mutual trust between the agency and union would lead to good results. We are making progress incrementally, but I would continue to work you all to resolve these issues,” he said, adding that the TRA has his support.
Hsu said the TRA is a government agency and therefore subject to government regulations, which makes the signing of collective agreements a challenging task.
It was the perseverance of the union and the TRA that made the agreement possible, she said.
Chang Cheng-yuan said that the agreement was a historic moment in 132 years of the agency’s history.
“I was the station master of Taipei Railway Station when the agency and the union started discussing signing a collective agreement. Now I am the bureau’s director-general, and it has finally come true,” he said.
The two sides finalized the wording of the agreement on July 31, he added.
The agreement would ensure that workers’ rights are protected and that work environments would be improved, including how shifts are scheduled, rules governing the implementation of paid leave and guidelines for compensation for working overtime and on holidays.
Regarding the difficulty of signing the agreement, Chang Wen-cheng said he was one of the representatives attending the first rounds of negotiations in 1989. At the time, the union was controlled by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), he said, adding that any document had to first be approved by the party.
Neither the Ministry of Labor nor the TRA were active in promoting the signing of the agreement, he said, adding that it was almost impossible to negotiate the agreement at that time.
Between 1990 and 2000, the union has held large-scale protests, as the TRA and the ministry were strict in reviewing the union’s demands. They would often offer excuses, such as claiming there was no precedent, to reject the union’s demands.
In response to media queries asking if the agreement means there would not be any strikes from railway employees during national holidays in the future, Lin said that more harmonious labor relations would help the agency to reform its operations, which began after the derailment of Puyuma Express No. 6432 in Yilan last year.
Not only would it lower the chances of labor strikes, it would also help the agency follow labor regulations, he said.
“The agency has various systems to reward its employees. We want to make sure the technical issues related to raising salaries and bonuses would fulfill legal requirements and would not diminish the morale of the employees,” Lin said.
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