“The Taipei City Government’s Department of Labor should stop barring our plan to form a union,” prospective members of a proposed National Taiwan University (NTU) Labor Union said yesterday.
At a press conference held with Democratic Progressive Party Taipei City Councilor Chien Yu-yen (簡余晏) and Taiwan Solidarity Union Legislator Lin Shih-chia (林世嘉), they urged the department to take the initiative in verifying union members’ work status and approve its application for establishment as soon as possible.
The union was organized in January by a group of 36 graduate students who work as teaching assistants, or temporary, full-time and part-time research assistants at the National Taiwan University. Four months after receiving the union’s application for approval, the city’s labor department rejected its request in May on the grounds that “it could not ascertain that the students and the school had an employer-employee relationship.”
Photo: CNA
Frustrated, the union filed a complaint against the department with the Council of Labor Affairs, which issued a decision on Sept. 7 stating that the city’s labor department had violated the Administrative Procedure Act (行政程序法) by not giving reasons for its refusal and ordered it to reach a new conclusion within two months.
“In its formal report, the department did not give us any reason as to why we are not considered workers. Neither did it make an effort to verify that we are school employees,” said the planned union’s president, Huang Shou-ta (黃守達). “Apart from the detailed information we submitted, the university has all records of employment. All the department has to do is ask the school to supply the proof that it needs.”
Huang also found the council’s decision “disappointing.”
“The council could have taken an active position and recognized our status. But instead of doing this, it tossed responsibility back to the city’s department,” he added.
In its decision, the council did not issue a ruling on the students’ employment status. Instead, it asked the labor department to clarify the employment relationship between the school and the employees in question.
Chiang Ming-chih (江明志), head of the department’s labor relations division, said because the proposed NTU Labor Union is a corporate union, “there has to be a clearly proven relationship between employer and employee,” as defined in the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
It is tricky, Chiang said, to determine whether the relationship between part-time and temporary assistants and the university constitute “employment” since the students are hired by professors to work on research projects commissioned by external institutes such as the National Science Council.
Also, in the city government’s opinion, whether teaching assistants are employed by professors or the university is a matter of debate.
It is also not clear whether a teacher’s right to manage and supervise assistants comes from his or her status as the employer or is granted by the university, the city government said.
“To put it simply, we have to clarify the employment relationship among students, professors and the university,” Chiang said.
Chang chih-cheng (張智程), a union member, dismissed the city government’s claim by asking why full-time research assistants are deemed school employees, but part-time assistants are not, even though their work entails the same responsibilities.
In addition, the university has a set of guidelines for regulating the employment relationship with teaching assistants, which is proof that they are recognized as school employees, Chang said.
“We have the regulations in black and white,” Chang said. “What more proof does the city government need?”
Chien said students working on campus need protection when facing low wages and heavy workloads.
“It is a basic right of workers to form unions. The Department of Labor should not become the Department of Employer,” she said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened 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), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS