A group of police officers, firefighters and teachers opposed to pension reform yesterday demanded that the government grant them the right to organize and strike.
About 30 people joined two Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a protest outside the Legislative Yuan.
“Pension reform has clearly shown that there is no equal relationship between the government and its employees — those targeted by pension reform did not have any room to punch back. The government always has the final say, and military officers, civil servants, teachers, police and firefighters mostly do not even have the right to organize,” KMT Legislator Apollo Chen (陳學聖) said.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
Protesters had previously opposed the “retroactive application” of pension reform, saying the reform arbitrarily changed their labor terms.
Military personnel and civil servants, including police officers and firefighters, are not allowed to form unions, while teachers are allowed to form some types of unions, but are banned from striking.
“The National Police Agency claims to represent our interests, but the reality is that it has a lot of ‘in-laws’ which exercise oversight over it, so it often does not dare to fight. That would not be a problem if we had a union to speak for us,” said Keng Chi-wen (耿繼文), a former director of the agency’s Internal Affairs Office.
“If the government feels that we should not be given more pension than other workers, that is fine. All I demand is we also be treated as those workers when calculating our salaries: We should receive overtime for the hours we put in on stand-by,” said Wu Wan-gu (吳萬固) a former firefighter and convener of the Changhua County Military, Civil Servants and Teachers Alliance.
“This round of pension reform has served as a catalyst, because we were only able to shout outside the Legislative Yuan, but if we had the power to strike, we would really be able to force the public to understand our demands,” National Federation of Teachers’ Unions director-general Huang Yao-nan (黃耀南) said, adding that collective agreements with schools negotiated by the union are often overturned by government agencies.
He said New Taipei Industrial Vocational High School had exempted teachers from parking fees only to see the policy overturned by the New Taipei City Government.
“Of the traditional three labor rights, our organizing rights are restricted because we are not allowed to organize a school union, our collective bargaining rights are not respected by government agencies and we do not have any rights to strike,” he said.
He added that his federation only “looks favorably” on the Taipei Teachers’ Union’s call to “take a legal holiday” on Sept. 28, National Teachers’ Day, but has no plans to participate.
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