A group of workers and labor rights advocates yesterday protested against the government’s labor policies in front of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) headquarters, urging President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to address issues such as illegal layoffs and a “hostile” work environment.
Chanting slogans and raising placards that read” “Ma Ying-jeou the bumbler,” activists and laid-off workers lashed out at the Council of Labor Affairs for listing a NT$20 million (US$688,000) budget for suing workers over a disputed loan, and said Ma, who doubles as KMT chairman, should instruct the KMT legislative caucus to cancel the budget.
“The great KMT Chairman Ma needs to ask the caucus to veto the budget that is used against workers; otherwise, his administration will leave a big stain on the history of labor rights in Taiwan,” they said.
Photo: CNA
The group also performed a skit, with members donning masks of Ma and other government officials to mock government incompetence, and accused the council of trying to take away their life savings by suing them over disputed loans.
The dispute was sparked about 15 years ago when the company, Hualon Textile, asked employees to accept lower salaries. The workers were then offered an opportunity to transfer to Fung An Textile Co — another textile company run by Hualon — on the condition they first give up all accumulated annuity for retirement payouts. At that time, the council provided retirement payouts to laid-off workers as loans and said the employees would not be asked to repay the money, as it would get the money back from their employer.
The situation worsened last year, when Hualon began to fall into arrears, with some employees being owed months of back wages, leading to protests earlier this year.
The council then filed lawsuits against the more than 400 workers who received the loans, saying it wanted the money back.
Although the council agreed in August to suspend the lawsuits for four months after repeated protests by the workers, and while Pan promised to come up with a solution within a year when he took office early last month, no solution has been forthcoming and the council continues to list a budget for the lawsuit for the next fiscal year.
Ma and the KMT did not respond to the protesters, with Ma presiding over the KMT Central Standing Committee at the headquarters.
The committee yesterday invited National Science Council Minister Cyrus Chu (朱敬一) to present a report on the nation’s technological development, as he called on the government to address a brain drain that is threatening the nation’s economic and technological development.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching