The Ministry of Education failed to protect the labor rights of educators at private colleges and universities, the Control Yuan said on Thursday as it issued corrective measures against the ministry.
Chronic neglect of the working conditions at private institutions of higher learning by the ministry deprived faculty members of their right to fair working conditions, Control Yuan members Lai Ting-ming (賴鼎銘) and Wang Mei-yu (王美玉) said in a news release.
Such rights are guaranteed by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which the legislature ratified in 2001, Lai and Wang said.
Taiwan’s aging population has triggered an existential crisis for private colleges and universities, with student enrollments falling steeply every year, the members said, adding that a registration rate of less than 60 percent was reported at seven institutions last year.
Thirty percent of private colleges and universities are expected to have registrations at unsustainable levels in the next decade, they said, adding that the situation was entirely foreseeable.
In response to financial pressures, administrators at some private education institutions drove down costs with unfair practices, including by withholding salaries, paying less than the minimum wage and firing teachers en masse, they said.
Additionally, some institutions contractually obliged faculty to work a set number of hours and take on administrative tasks without compensation, or linked performance reviews to registration numbers, they said.
The ministry was called upon to handle wage disputes 14 times in the past five years, but the performance of the officials involved was unsatisfactory, as they typically neglected to bring cases to arbitration and did not investigate claims of wrongdoing, Lai and Wang said.
For example, the southern satellite campus of a private institution reportedly paid NT$28 per hour of overtime and compensated interns NT$15.2 per hour, they said.
The current minimum hourly wage in Taiwan is NT$168.
Education officials should not have allowed the situation and they ignored the issue, resulting in numerous lawsuits that negatively affected the quality of education at the institute, the members said.
Privately owned institutions of higher education have laid off 166 faculty members while reporting the resignation of 1,595 teachers over the past three years, Lai and Wang said.
The ministry last year established a voluntary program for private institutions to provide faculty severance packages, but only seven institutions volunteered, they said.
Faculty members at private institutions have experienced infringements on their personal dignity, professional image, and labor and human rights as a result of the ministry’s passivity, which must be urgently addressed, the Control Yuan members said.
In addition, regulations should be established to protect the employees of dissolved private institutions, they said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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