After a long wait, teachers in Taiwan officially established their national trade union yesterday after a legal revision that took effect on May 1 finally allowed teachers to unionize.
The National Teachers’ Union (NTU), a successor of the National Teachers’ Association formed 12 years ago, pledged in its inaugural statement to help open a new era in the country’s education system while seeking better protection for teachers’ rights.
However, the amended Labor Union Act (工會法) does not allow teachers’ unions to stage strikes, unlike workers in other industries.
Council of Labor Affairs Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) said this provision was mainly to ensure that the right to education for students will not be compromised.
Wang said the NTU was the first step to better protect the basic rights of teachers and that teachers can seek to resolve their disputes with management by way of arbitration.
“In the long run, teachers may one day be given the right to strike,” Wang said.
Speaking at the inaugural ceremony, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said that teaching has been a “profession of conscience” and that teachers’ rights and well-being should be better protected with the establishment of unions.
He expressed the hope that teachers’ unions could serve as the promoters of a harmonious relationship between management and labor, rather than an adversarial one, so that education could become a driving force for national development.
In a press statement, Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said the NTU would serve as a platform for dialogue within the education sector.
She pledged that her party would fully cooperate with teachers’ unions in cultivating the next generation of talent for the country if she wins the presidency.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS