Not my Saturdays!
The schedule of holidays for next year recently came to my attention. My immediate reaction was: “No! Not my Saturdays!”
One thing I cannot tolerate about my new adopted home is the current system of making up Saturdays. It just does not make sense.
First, Saturdays are not the government’s to take. Unions around the world fought for the two-day weekend. Our representatives have enshrined the 40-hour workweek in law, but can willy-nilly just dismiss it to say: “Not this week, though.” That is not how laws work. The speed limit says 60, but if you are really in a hurry...
Second, we have lives on Saturdays. You are making up a work day, but we have an entire life and economy that thrives on Saturday. Shopping, cram schools, restaurants, part-time jobs, etc. You are just stealing from one to pay the other. Are our Saturday activities less important than those on the weekday? Who makes that call? If you want to give people an extra day off, do you really need to take something away from them later? Am I alone in seeing something really wrong with that mentality?
Finally, I know this only works for schools, but if the school year were to be extended by a single day or two, no one would notice or complain. Other workplaces could consider adding flexible hours for their workers so as to fill the time in a manner that respects the workers, their need for rest and time with family.
Aaron Andrews
Taichung
Too many teacher holidays
The legislature has done workers a favor by getting Sept. 28 — Teachers’ Day — listed as a national holiday. Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce chairman Lin Por-fong (林伯豐) responded by saying that everyone should have a break. He says that teachers should try to get Teachers’ Day off work, too.
As a teacher, I do not agree with this idea. Teachers have too many holidays as it is. When teachers’ summer and winter holidays are added to all the other days off, they only work for just more than half the days in a year. That being the case, I suppose Lin was joking.
On the other hand, maybe teachers really should have Teachers’ Day off, just like workers do. After all, have teachers not set up a labor union?
Parents often ask me: “Principal, are your teachers civil servants or workers?”
It is hard to come up with a ready answer, because teachers enjoy the welfare benefits of civil servants, but now they also have the rights due to labor union members. They really are a privileged and pampered lot.
When the summer vacation arrives, I am afraid it will be a nightmare once more for many school principals. Teachers who also perform administrative roles might announce that they will not be doubling up anymore after August. They will be off on their holidays.
Arranging coaching lessons each summer vacation is quite a tough assignment. Students have to go along with the “golden period” during which teachers are willing to hold classes. At other times, sorry, they are doing something else.
For a lot of workers, both parents in the family have to go out to work. They have to make arrangements for their children during summer vacation, and, no matter whether they go to cram schools or attend coaching lessons at their regular schools, it still involves spending extra money.
Teachers get their salaries and coaching fees too, and they can go traveling abroad in the summer vacation. Workers can only dream of such things.
Compared with the half-year off work that teachers get, giving workers an extra day off on Teachers’ Day is a trivial matter. Employers need not be so mean, and they should not use this as a chance to get teachers worked up.
Not giving teachers a day off on Teachers’ Day does not imply any lack of respect for teachers. On the other hand, if teachers want society’s respect, they can get it through their enthusiasm and dedication. They had best not get into the mindset of just wanting to have long holidays while letting their students’ study needs fall by the wayside.
Chen Chi-nung
Nantou County
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
After thousands of Taiwanese fans poured into the Tokyo Dome to cheer for Taiwan’s national team in the World Baseball Classic’s (WBC) Pool C games, an image of food and drink waste left at the stadium said to have been left by Taiwanese fans began spreading on social media. The image sparked wide debate, only later to be revealed as an artificially generated image. The image caption claimed that “Taiwanese left trash everywhere after watching the game in Tokyo Dome,” and said that one of the “three bad habits” of Taiwanese is littering. However, a reporter from a Japanese media outlet
An article published in the Dec. 12, 1949, edition of the Central Daily News (中央日報) bore a headline with the intimidating phrase: “You Cannot Escape.” The article was about the execution of seven “communist spies,” some say on the basis of forced confessions, at the end of the 713 Penghu Incident. Those were different times, born of political paranoia shortly after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) relocated to Taiwan following defeat in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The phrase was a warning by the KMT regime to the local populace not to challenge its power or threaten national unity. The
Since taking office, President William Lai (賴清德) has been an active proponent of the Healthy Taiwan initiative. As a member of the Healthy Taiwan Promotion Committee, I have also contributed recommendations on various pharmaceutical policies. After the committee concluded its seventh meeting on Saturday last week, Lai announced that the government is considering a three-year suspension on the Drug Expenditure Target (DET) system’s routine drug price surveys, highlighting the need to further support drug supply resilience. While I am supportive of this policy direction, I must also stress the importance of maintaining our original objective of improving the quality of
RSS