Former freeway toll collectors said they would camp outside the Ministry of Transportation and Communications building in Taipei on Sunday next week to wait for job openings in the ministry’s agencies.
Meanwhile, about 40 people were involved in protests yesterday, demanding that the government meet the workers’ employment needs.
Half of the protestors were students supporting the former toll fee collectors, organizers said.
Photo: Chen Chi-chu, Taipei Times
Four of the students managed to gain access to a conference room in the building where Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuan-shih (葉匡時) was presiding over a forum attended by aviation industry representatives and students.
The students were removed from the conference room by police officers and security personnel as they demanded government-provided jobs for the former toll collectors.
Yeh apologized to the forum for the disruption.
“We understand how the former toll collectors feel and hope that they can rationally express their opinions... However, it looks like those who stormed into the conference room were not former toll collectors,” Yeh said.
“We hope they talk with the National Freeway Bureau and consider whether they are doing the workers a favor or harming their chances of finding new jobs,” he added.
The former toll collectors at the protest said that the bureau claimed it has no job openings for them, but it has arranged new jobs for toll collection station managers.
In response, the bureau said that people who held managerial positions at the toll stations are civil servants and can be legally transferred to different government jobs.
However the toll collectors are government contractors, who are not eligible for such reassignment.
The former toll collectors became unemployed after the nation launched a distance-based collection system earlier this year, in which all the manual collection booths were removed.
Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co (FETC), the contractor administering the electronic toll collection system, is bound by its contract with the National Freeway Bureau to find jobs for staff who were laid off by the bureau because of the change to the system.
Statistics from the bureau showed there are 942 toll collectors, with 456 of them having accepted job openings provided by FETC.
As of yesterday, 242 were in FETC-provided jobs, with 212 still waiting. Despite the job openings offered by FETC, some workers refused to go to the interviews and insisted that the bureau find jobs within the ministry for them.
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