Contractors building Terminal 3 at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport should make sure that foreign workers they hire for the project receive at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine in their home countries before arriving in Taiwan, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said last week.
A team formed by South Korea’s Samsung C&T Corp and Taiwan’s RSEA Engineering Corp won the tender for the project.
For the construction, which began last month, the companies applied to hire about 2,200 workers from the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia, with the first group of 400 to 500 workers scheduled to arrive by the end of this year.
As a COVID-19 cluster infection was detected at a foreign workers’ dormitory at King Yuan Electronics in Hsinchu last month, the ministry last week held a meeting with Samsung and RSEA to address issues that might arise from the management of foreign workers in the project.
“COVID-19 outbreaks among foreign construction workers would cause severe delays to the nation’s major infrastructure project, which in turn would expose the contractors to greater business risks,” Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Chi Wen-chung (祁文中) said.
“We have advised the construction team to have all of its foreign workers inoculated with vaccines recognized by the international community. If they [foreign workers] have trouble getting two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, they should at least get the first dose,” Chi said.
Construction teams should adopt high disease-prevention standards to prevent an outbreak at worker dormitories, Chi said, adding that the ministry would meet with the Central Epidemic Command Center to discuss health guidelines that should be used to regulate foreign workers.
Taiwan International Airport Corp said that it is reviewing construction plans submitted by the contractors and it is building dormitories for foreign workers, adding that on-site construction of the terminal would start before the end of this year or at the beginning of next year.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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