Firefighters struggled to extinguish the fire that raged at the Nan Ya Plastics white pearl paper plant in Chiayi on Sunday, taking about 17 hours to put it out. The thick fumes that billowed out of the blaze were blamed for a black-colored rain that occurred shortly after, thought to be the result of partially combusted carbon residue in the air. This should be a wake-up call for the nation about its lax attitude toward industrial safety.
Even though Nan Ya is listed on the stock exchange separately from Formosa Plastics, it is actually a member of Formosa Group. Fires at Formosa’s sixth naphtha cracker in Yunlin are still very fresh in the memory, having happened in July this year. The group is still smarting from the compensation it had to pay for those fires, so the Nan Ya blaze only adds to the financial burden and deepens the damage done to the company’s reputation.
The group has come under scrutiny and criticism from all quarters and it seems to have gone adrift since the death of its founder Wang Yung-ching (王永慶). In the face of this string of industrial accidents, safety and restoring the group’s battered corporate image have become priorities.
That these accidents are, to some extent at least, the product of this nation’s industrial culture is a damning indictment of attitudes toward safety in this country. On Thursday, seven lives were lost when scaffolding collapsed along a section of highway in Nantou County, and before that there was an uproar when an engineer died, seemingly from overwork. Sadly, it appears that all sectors of industry are affected by this indifference to basic health and safety principles.
This nation has paid insufficient attention to industrial safety and the problems are across the board.
First, workers tend to shy away from hassle. The slapdash attitude — the “oh, it’ll be alright” approach — to health and safety is still very much with us and this makes it difficult to implement safety rules effectively. Indeed, “the devil is in the details,” and that devil is behind the recent string of accidents.
The second problem is with the industrialists — the top brass. With wafer-thin profits and mounting benefit costs, even the managerial system at a major enterprise, such as Formosa Group, is built around cost-cutting and efficiency, and this tends to come at the expense of safety. In the past, keeping costs low across the board was considered a virtue. Perhaps pressure from the increasing emphasis on human rights, the environment and sufficient wages has exacerbated safety problems.
Finally, monitoring by the government doesn’t seem to be working, either.
After any accident, the Council of Labor Affairs declares that it will “assess the system of accountability” and “conduct a survey of safety in the workplace and fines,” but none of this can make up for the loss of life.
While there is obviously a need to do something, there seems to be a huge gap between the regulations that appear on paper and the regulations that are enforced.
Occupational safety needs to be examined at every level; from the health and safety management procedures of major enterprises to fire prevention and safety protection at individual sites, to fire exits in department stores. Unfortunately, it is often a case of “all talk and no action.” The string of accidents and disaster at Formosa Group plants are not the fault of one particular group: The blame lies with the government, industry and workers alike.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS