The government is revising regulations to make it easier to hire migrant workers for public construction projects to ease a labor shortage in the construction industry.
The new rules are likely to take effect early next month, the Ministry of Labor said yesterday.
At present, to be able to hire migrant workers, public works contractors must be working on a project with a total cost of at least NT$10 billion (US$330.73 million), any separate contracts must amount to NT$1 billion and the construction period must be 15 months or longer.
The ministry has agreed to remove the NT$10 billion threshold after an engineering contractors association complained that the restrictions have caused a serious labor shortage.
The association said that some members complained that many public projects in recent years have been for less than NT$10 billion, which meant that many firms could not apply to hire migrant workers.
Changing the rules would allow an additional 1,382 migrant workers to be hired, the Public Construction Commission said.
Official statistics show that the annual number of migrant workers brought into the construction sector from 2001 to 2006 topped 10,000, with the number hitting a record high of 33,300 in 2011, but since 2007, the average number of applications for hiring migrants was less than 10,000, with just 4,100 applications in 2018 and 4,400 last year.
Many major public construction projects were launched from 2001 to 2011, leading to the introduction of a large number of migrant workers, the ministry said.
However, although there has been an increase in public projects in the past few years, they have been smaller ones, so there was a decline in applications, it said.
Starlux Airlines, Taiwan’s newest international carrier, has announced it would apply to join the Oneworld global airline alliance before the end of next year. In an investor conference on Monday, Starlux Airlines chief executive officer Glenn Chai (翟健華) said joining the alliance would help it access Taiwan. Chai said that if accepted, Starlux would work with other airlines in the alliance on flight schedules, passenger transits and frequent flyer programs. The Oneworld alliance has 13 members, including American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Qantas, and serves more than 900 destinations in 170 territories. Joining Oneworld would also help boost
A new tropical storm formed late yesterday near Guam and is to approach closest to Taiwan on Thursday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Tropical Storm Pulasan became the 14th named storm of the year at 9:25pm yesterday, the agency said. As of 8am today, it was near Guam traveling northwest at 21kph, it said. The storm’s structure is relatively loose and conditions for strengthening are limited, WeatherRisk analyst Wu Sheng-yu (吳聖宇) said on Facebook. Its path is likely to be similar to Typhoon Bebinca, which passed north of Taiwan over Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and made landfall in Shanghai this morning, he said. However, it
Taiwan's Gold Apollo Co (金阿波羅通信) said today that the pagers used in detonations in Lebanon the day before were not made by it, but by a company called BAC which has a license to use its brand. At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon yesterday. Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo. A senior Lebanese security source told Reuters that Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 pagers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. "The product was not
COLD FACTS: ‘Snow skin’ mooncakes, made with a glutinous rice skin and kept at a low temperature, have relatively few calories compared with other mooncakes Traditional mooncakes are a typical treat for many Taiwanese in the lead-up to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but a Taipei-based dietitian has urged people not to eat more than one per day and not to have them every day due to their high fat and calorie content. As mooncakes contain a lot of oil and sugar, they can have negative health effects on older people and those with diabetes, said Lai Yu-han (賴俞含), a dietitian at Taipei Hospital of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. “The maximum you can have is one mooncake a day, and do not eat them every day,” Lai
RSS