The Ministry of Labor on Tuesday issued guidelines aimed at clarifying whether workers should be deemed employees or contractors in labor contracts.
The guidelines are not legally binding, but are designed to help businesses, workers and government agencies to make better determinations.
Under the guidelines, whether a worker should be considered an employee or not largely depends on their level of subordination, or more simply, how much independence they have in determining aspects of their work.
Determining factors include whether workers are allowed to freely choose when, where and how they work, if they can freely refuse assigned work and if they face consequences for violating company regulations.
They also include how involved the worker is in a company’s structure, such as whether they can independently finish their work, or if they have to cooperate with others to do so.
The guidelines include a 25-item checklist to evaluate contracts.
The more items checked off on the list, the more likely it is that the worker should be deemed a formal employee, the ministry said.
Businesses should review their labor contracts and make adjustments if necessary, but labor authorities have the final say in determining whether workers are deemed employees, the ministry said.
The guidelines were drafted in response to the death of two food couriers killed in traffic accidents last month.
The couriers were not insured by their companies, Uber Eats and Foodpanda, as they were deemed to be contractors, not employees.
By law, labor insurance is mandatory for employees of companies with more than five workers, and it covers injuries on the job, death benefits and retirement payments.
Companies that fail to comply are subject to fines.
The incidents sparked investigations into eight food delivery platforms in Taiwan, and the ministry determined that five are formal employers of their couriers or drivers, including Uber Eats and Foodpanda.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift