The Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co (FETC) cannot do anything to help former highway toll collectors if they keep turning down the job offers made to them, Far Eastern Group chairman Douglas Hsu (徐旭東) said yesterday.
“We have offered them job opportunities, but they [former toll collectors] did not accept them and only sought compensation from the government. They even went on the national freeways to protest. There is really nothing more we can do about it,” Hsu said.
Hsu made the comments while addressing participants at the International Green and Smart Mobility Forum.
Hsu said in his speech that electronic freeway toll collection has served as a platform for different technologies to thrive and encourage more people to develop new business opportunities. All these changes have helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and people should keep the system rather than reject it, he said.
In response, former freeway toll collectors said that Hsu’s remarks were simply unacceptable.
“Even though FETC did offer jobs, all of them demand qualifications. We simply cannot do jobs like computer programming,” said Sun Hsiu-luan (孫秀鑾), a representative of the self-help group for former toll collectors. “We do not take the jobs not because we do not work hard, but because we really cannot do the jobs FETC has offered, after careful evaluation. Like people say: ‘Don’t do it if you can’t do it.’”
Sun added that the National Freeway Bureau should be responsible for finding jobs for freeway toll collectors, and that the bureau should not pass the buck as the laid-off workers’ former employer.
Freeway toll collectors lost their jobs after the nation launched the distance-based ETC system and removed all the toll booths from the freeways. A total of 942 toll collectors had indicated that they wanted to be re-employed by FETC or companies affiliated with it.
According to the bureau, 508 chose to take severance payments equivalent to five months of their salaries.
Among the remaining former toll collectors, 149 have found jobs and 19 are ready to start their new ones.
However, 50 of them had chosen to leave their new jobs, and 216 others have neither claimed the severance payment nor accepted jobs offered to them by FETC.
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