A system of flexible working hours, as proposed by a group of business leaders to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) earlier this week, would have a negative impact on workers’ lives, several labor groups said yesterday.
Their remark was a response to a suggestion to Ma by the business community that authorities scrap the current -working-hour cap of 84 hours over two weeks and adopt a “flexitime” system.
The business leaders said that this would give employers more flexibility in arranging human resources and working hours based on market demand.
However, if such a system was adopted, employees might have to work unpredictable schedules and long hours whenever the workload was heavy, the labor groups — the Taiwan Labor Front, the Taiwan Women’s Link and the Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU) — said at a joint press conference in Taipei.
Moreover, a flexitime system would give employers a reason not to pay workers overtime, TCTU secretary-general Hsieh Chuang-chih (謝創智) said. He added that long hours would increase the likelihood of accidents, as well as possibly damage family relationships.
In defense of their proposal, the business leaders said that flexitime is widely used in Germany.
However, Hsieh rebutted the point, saying that Germany has many different systems and if Taiwan wanted to learn from the European nation then it should learn about the whole package.
Hsieh added that Germany has a powerful labor union, unlike Taiwan, where labor--management relations tend to benefit employers.
The proposed system would have the greatest impact on female workers, said Tsai Wan-fen (蔡宛芬), secretary-general of the Taiwan Women’s Link. Such a situation with women working longer hours would only make Taiwan’s low birthrate an even more difficult issue to resolve, she said.
Son Yu-lian (孫友聯), head of the Taiwan Labor Front, urged the government to listen to workers’ voices and not just those in the business community.
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