Employers “act as they see fit” over the provision of childcare, New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Hung Tzu-yung (洪慈庸) said yesterday, accusing the Ministry of Labor of failing to actively encourage the establishment of formal day care facilities within corporations and public agencies.
“The current situation is that everyone acts as they see fit, which typically means taking childcare ‘measures’ rather than providing childcare ‘facilities,’ because the former is cheaper,” she said during a hearing of the Legislative Yuan’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee, held to discuss favorable child-rearing conditions to improve stubbornly low birth rates.
In response to Hung’s remarks, Deputy Minister of Labor Hau Feng-ming (郝鳳鳴) said that only about 100 of the nation’s more than 4,000 government agencies, public schools and public corporations have established day care facilities, compared with 4.1 percent of corporations that have more than 250 employees.
“If the government does not lead the way, how can we encourage private employers to act?” Hung said, adding that 20 percent of large employers have failed to adopt childcare measures, violating Act of Gender Equality in Employment (性別工作平等法) requirements.
In response to questions from Hung on what the ministry considered to be a friendly work environment, Hau said employers providing childcare measures instead of facilities was an “acceptable” measure to cut costs.
“Establishing a day care facility is extremely expensive and has to be managed over the long term, so we feel that taking ‘measures’ is acceptable, as long as they resolve childcare problems,” he said.
While the Act of Gender Equality in Employment requires all organizations or companies with more than 250 employees to either provide childcare facilities or take childcare measures, the law does not allow for the penalization of employers who fail to comply, with some opting out after judging that their employees have no need for childcare, Department of Employment Welfare and Retirement head Chen Hsiu-chin (陳秀琴) said.
Childcare measures refer to either negotiating a collective contract with an outside facility to provide day care for employees, or providing employees with childcare subsidy allowances, she added.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS