The government should offer relief funds to school lunch caterers, whose businesses were disrupted by the Ministry of Education’s policy authorizing schools to switch to virtual classrooms amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Huang Kuo-shu (黃國書) said yesterday.
Last year, in-person classes were canceled nationwide after the government raised the COVID-19 alert to level 3, and the government subsidized school lunch caterers for financial losses sustained from food they had bought before the schools were closed, Huang said, adding that they were compensated for lost revenue and salaries as well.
The financial losses that caterers have sustained this year, which they suffered through no fault of their own, was no less than that of last year, he told a news conference in Taipei, adding that the government should keep them in mind when it distributes relief funds.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
While schools are supposed to compensate caterers for their losses based on the procurement contracts, they generally do not have such funding, he said.
Chen Ming -hsin (陳明信), chairman of a business association for boxed meal operators, said they should be compensated based on their contracts with schools, and a mechanism should be established to settle future disputes.
“As school lunch caterers, we must obtain special permission from schools to offer services and maintain high hygiene standards,” he said. “Last year, we experienced the longest summer vacation of three-and-a-half months. This year, our collective business losses in April and May are expected to exceed NT$400 million [US$13.6 million].”
School lunch caterers serve meals to 1.71 million pupils across the country daily, Chen said, adding that 10 large school lunch caterers have had to close down over the past two years because of inflation and the pandemic.
The government should offer them financial assistance, he said.
“This year, the situation was even more chaotic, because local governments were authorized to decide on their own if school should be closed,” Chen said. “We were often notified on Friday or even on Sunday that schools would switch to virtual classrooms on Monday, but we need to purchase ingredients at least three days in advance and begin marinating meat ahead of time. If schools were closed, we would have to donate the purchased food ingredients to charity groups or throw them away when they rot.”
School lunch caterers should not be asked to bear the losses alone, Chen said, adding that net margins are already low at 3 to 5 percent.
Many of their employees are women returning from a career gap, and they might find other jobs if school lunches were canceled for more than two months, he said.
Chen Hsi-hung (陳錫鴻), deputy director of student affairs and school security division at the ministry’s K-12 Administration, said that schools and school lunch caterers have contracts which stipulate that schools should compensate caterers for all additional costs incurred if they are not liable for the increase in costs.
Schools can also extend their contracts with caterers, he said, adding that the ministry will help schools fulfill the terms of the contracts.
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