Government agencies and companies must approve “disease prevention childcare leave” requests by employees who need to take care of a child under the age of 12 or with a disability, although employers would not be required to pay them while they are on leave, labor authorities said yesterday.
The New Taipei City and Taipei City Governments announced earlier in the day that public and private schools from high-school level and below are to be closed from today until Friday next week due to a spike in COVID-19 cases in the two municipalities.
Government agencies and firms must approve the leave application and cannot deduct points from the employee’s performance evaluation score or impose other punishments for the request, Taipei Department of Labor Commissioner Chen Hsin-yu (陳信瑜) said, adding that employers face a fine of NT$20,000 to NT$300,000 (US$713 to US$10,698) if they contravene the rule.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
The New Taipei City Labor Affairs Department added that the definition of a guardian includes adoptive parents, grandparents and other people who take care of children on a daily basis, and is not restricted to parents.
If an employee’s family member cannot take care of themselves and is under home isolation or quarantine, or centralized isolation or quarantine, and needs to be taken care of, the employee may also take “epidemic prevention isolation leave,” it said.
Employers would not be required to pay employees’ salaries while they are on leave, it said, adding that employers and employees may negotiate the terms.
The New Power Party’s (NPP) caucus said last year it had asked that employees taking “disease prevention childcare leave” be paid.
The NPP caucus believes that the government, firms and employees should work together to fight the spread of COVID-19, but workers should not bear the entire burden of the “unprofitability” of being unable to go to work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it said in a statement.
Instead, the government, companies and workers should share the cost in a reasonable fashion, it said.
Salary subsidies for “disease prevention childcare leave” should be included in discussions of the Executive Yuan’s proposals to amend the Special Act on COVID-19 Prevention, Relief and Recovery (嚴重特殊傳染性肺炎防治及紓困振興特別條例), and the COVID-19 relief budget should be increased to NT$630 billion, the NPP caucus said, urging other causes and lawmakers to support it.
Separately, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said in a statement that many parents were caught off guard by the sudden announcement of school closures and faced a dilemma of whether to request “disease prevention childcare leave.”
The KMT said it recommends that the central government consider offering subsidies to workers who apply for “disease prevention childcare leave,” as is done for people who take “epidemic prevention isolation leave,” to prevent employees from being unwilling or afraid to take time off.
Additional reporting by Lee I-chia, Hsieh Chun-lin and Sherry Hsiao
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
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
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