More than 1,000 labor union members, activists, medical interns, nurses, migrant workers, teachers and students expressed their dissatisfaction with working conditions and the employment environment in a protest in Taipei on Workers’ Day yesterday.
Holding flags and signs outlining their demands, workers from various industries gathered at Liberty Square at noon to protest against poverty and worker exploitation.
Among a series of demands, groups called for the abolition of the responsibility system in the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), a reduction in the number of temporary workers and measures to protect young people’s right to work.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Leading the parade, more than 200 nurses shouted: “We refuse to allow patients to take care of patients” and “patients can only be healthy when nurses get enough rest.”
Taiwan Radical Nurses Union member Liang Hsiu-mei (梁秀眉) said that in addition to protesting against insufficient manpower and rest hours, this year the union is emphasizing the serious problem of “freakish shift arrangements” — the unreasonable and frequent shift changes with only a few hours of rest in between, leading to exhaustion and sleep disorders.
Other protesters looked to future generations.
Photo: AFP
“We are standing out here not just for our generation, but also for our children. Many of our members’ children face difficulties in finding a stable job and often end up relying on their parents’ income,” said Yang Chun-hua (楊俊華), chief secretary of the Labor Union of the Taipei City Government’s Department of Environmental Protection.
Yang said about 20 percent of union members’ children were on student loans and about one-third of the members were still paying back credit card debt with their salary.
South Taiwan Passenger Transportation Ltd Liability Co Trade Union chairperson Chen Yun-hsiang (陳韻翔) said bus drivers were often forced to work excessive hours under poor health conditions, endangering the lives of passengers.
Holding signs that read “equality” and “minimum wage covers all workers,” foreign workers called for the same wage as local workers.
On Ketagalan Boulevard in the morning, hundreds of labor rights activists from about 30 civic groups held a protest against deteriorating labor conditions by performing sports competitions that symbolized exploitation or economic burdens faced by workers.
The “events” — a race to show that workers cannot catch up financially, weightlifting to represent the heavy economic burden on families and a pole-jumping competition to symbolize rising consumer and energy prices — highlighted the reality that the losers in the system are “guaranteed an unfair game,” said the Taiwan Labor Front, which organized the event.
Taiwan Labor Front secretary-general Son Yu-lian (孫友聯) said about one-fourth of salaried workers are unable to save more than NT$50,000 (US$1,714) a year and the majority barely make a living with their low wages.
A generation of breakdown and collapse is being created, Son said.
“Why is it that we workers only earn about 44 percent of the total income, but have to pay about 75 percent of the total income tax in Taiwan?” Alliance for Fair Tax Reform convener Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋) said, adding that the government was lying to the public with its promises of imposing a tax on the rich.
“The Executive Yuan recently announced it would raise the stock income tax threshold from NT$3 million, as initially proposed, to NT$4 million, but the income tax deduction for workers is only about NT$104,000,” Wang said.
Near the end of the rally, the activists pasted pieces of paper that read “poverty,” “exhaustion,” “blind,” “debt” and other characters on a large board decorated with a printout of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) Facebook page.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS