The Fisheries Agency on Sunday began the first phase of examinations to recruit 79 personnel to conduct an increased number of inspections to improve the labor conditions of migrant crew employed on Taiwanese-owned distant-water fishing (DWF) vessels.
A total of 189 examinees attended written exams in Taipei and Kaohsiung to qualify to work in a variety of positions, including as investigators of labor rights violations, catch inspectors and translators, the agency said in a statement.
An oral exam is to be held on Aug. 20, with the names of the successful applicants to be released on Sept. 2, it said.
The recruits “will become a new force for safeguarding fishery rights in the country, improving the capacity of Taiwan’s fishery management, and promoting the sustainable development of the industry,” agency Acting Director-General Chang Chih-sheng (張致盛) said.
The hiring is part of a broader action plan the agency has adopted to improve working conditions for migrant fishers on Taiwan’s DWF fleets.
Taiwan has one of the world’s largest DWF fleets. Rights groups such as Greenpeace and Taiwanese migrants’ organizations have long highlighted human rights contraventions on Taiwan-owned vessels, including debt-bondage contract arrangements, withheld wages, poor working and living conditions, and physical abuse.
The government has been under increased pressure to remedy these problems after numerous cases were reported.
Yilan Migrant Fishermen Union secretary-general Allison Lee (李麗華) said she sees problems in the way the new personnel are being recruited, which she says might favor Taiwanese DWF vessel owners during inspections.
“Many of the examinees are from organizations founded or organized by Taiwanese vessel owners. Since the recruits also worked for vessel owners, it is likely they might not conduct proper labor checks,” Lee said.
“It is like being a sports competitor while also being the referee during a match,” she added.
Lee said that the new inspectors are contract workers, not civil servants.
The new inspectors and translators are likely to begin work by the end of September, said Chiu Yi-hsien (邱宜賢), section chief at the agency’s Deep Sea Fisheries Division.
The are to be concentrated in the DWF ports of Nanfangao (南方澳) in Yilan, Cianjhen (前鎮) in Kaohsiung and Donggang (東港) in Pingtung.
There are about 21,000 migrant fishers employed on Taiwanese DWF fleets, including 13,000 Indonesians and 6,300 Filipinos, agency officials said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS