When a female temporary worker complained of being the victim of sexual harassment, the Council of Labor Affairs said that no employer-employee relationship existed between the employer at the temporary work place and the temporary employee, and that the sole responsibility for the incident therefore lay with the temporary work agency.
This is tantamount to a government announcement that as long as employers use temporary workers, they are free to engage in sexual harassment, sexual discrimination and sexual bullying in the workplace, while temporary workers are treated like lambs for the slaughter.
On Women’s Day last year, the Awakening Foundation held a press conference condemning the council for its interpretation of the law and its decision to overturn a verdict that made both the temp agency and the temporary workplace the employers of temp workers.
The council promised to improve the situation and the Cabinet said agencies should be regulated based on the Act of Gender Equality in Employment (性別工作平等法), enforced by the Bureau of Labor Affairs at the local government level, while the temporary workplace should be regulated by the Sexual Harassment Prevention Law (性騷擾防治法), which is enforced by the Bureau of Social Affairs at the local government level.
This establishes a two-track system in which the responsibility is shared between the labor affairs and social affairs bureaus.
Two acts and two authorities would seem to offer double the protection, but it is only the government playing with words in an attempt to shirk responsibility — it actually puts temporary workers in a worse position.
When the council said that the unit hiring a temporary worker from a temp agency is not that worker’s employer, it in effect voids the Act of Gender Equality in Employment and its guarantees for temporary workers.
For most temporary workers, the temp agency merely functions as an intermediary. It is neither the place of work, nor the unit managing the worker’s time off and other details. Furthermore, the temp agency and the temporary workplace have shared interests: The temp agency provides manpower to the temporary workplace and charges a commission for doing so. It does its utmost to satisfy the temporary workplace’s needs. After all, how likely is it that a temp agency, when faced with a case of sexual harassment in the workplace, would interfere with the management of the temporary workplace by demanding that it improve its work environment?
From now on, when temporary workers encounter sexual harassment, the workplace will only have to claim it is not the employer, that the relevant information is posted at the workplace under its jurisdiction and that the matter is the result of the individual perpetrator’s actions or that it should be dealt with by the two parties involved on their own.
Ninety percent of all victims of sexual harassment in the workplace are women and the perpetrators are superiors, co-workers or maybe even an environment or system rife with sexual prejudice.
In addition to protecting the interests of those affected by sexual harassment, it is important to improve the work environment to prevent such incidents.
A Control Yuan report shows that the government is the biggest employer of temp workers in the nation, with one-ninth of the country’s temporary workers. This raises the question of whether the two-track system is meant to protect the interests of temporary workers or to sacrifice these workers and gender equality in the workplace to benefit the government and corporations.
Lin Shiou-yi is director of the development division at the Awakening Foundation.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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