Surprise nighttime inspections of six financial institutions found that all of them appeared to be engaged in one or more allegedly unlawful activities, Taipei Department of Labor Commissioner Chen Hsin-yu (陳信瑜) said yesterday.
Beginning in May, the department received several petitions from Taipei City Councilor Hsu Li-hsin (徐立信) and the Taiwan Federation of Financial Unions, reporting that bank employees have been working too much overtime trying to handle applications for COVID-19 relief loans and were not getting paid for it, Chen said.
Applications for the government’s COVID-19 pandemic relief loan program for Taiwanese workers aged 20 or older opened on April 30, with each applicant able to apply for a maximum of NT$100,000 (US$3,404) per person.
The Ministry of Labor has stipulated that companies handling work associated with the loan program can be regarded as working under an “unexpected event” situation as stipulated in the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), meaning that employees would be allowed to extend their working hours or work on holidays if needed.
The department decided to conduct unannounced inspections at night at six randomly selected financial institutions that were offering the relief loans to check on employees’ working conditions, Chen said.
She said that she had personally led the spot inspections of state-owned Bank of Taiwan, Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank, KGI Bank, Yuanta Commercial Bank, Standard Chartered Bank Taiwan and the Small and Medium Enterprise Credit Guarantee Fund of Taiwan.
All six have allegedly contravened the Labor Standards Act through such actions as not paying overtime according to the legally prescribed calculation method, not giving enough days off and not giving the correct payment for working on rest days, the department said.
Other alleged contraventions include not reporting the overtime situation to the labor union or the department within the required timeframe and inaccurate attendance records, it added.
“The inspections found some bank employees worked 61.5 hours of overtime in one month,” Chen said.
Bank managers should comply with occupational safety and health regulations to prevent employees dying from overwork, Chen said, as she encouraged employees to collect proof of unlawful behavior by their employers and report them to the department.
Department official Chen Kun-hong (陳昆鴻) said the six companies would be allowed to make statements to respond to the allegations that they had contravened the labor act.
However, if the allegations are confirmed, they could be fined between NT$20,000 and NT$1 million, Chen Kun-hong said.
There are more than 30 financial institutions handling the COVID-19 relief loans, and the department would continue to conduct inspections of their working conditions, although those who have been reported to the department for alleged breaches would be checked first, Chen Kun-hong said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS