A draft bill designed to prevent sudden mass layoffs and oblige employers to negotiate with laid-off staff, passed its first reading in the legislature's Sanitation, Envi-ronment and Social Welfare Com-mittee yesterday.
The Council of Labor Affairs and DPP Legislator Lai Chin-lin (賴勁麟) both sponsored draft legislation to address problems created by companies suddenly shutting down and leaving their employees without any compensation.
The committee combined the two proposals into a "mass layoff status" bill.
The bill would require companies wishing to layoff substantial numbers of employees to submit a plan both to the CLA and the labor affairs departments of local governments 50 days in advance or faces fines ranging from NT$100,000 to NT$500,000.
The dismissal plan would have to detail the dates and reasons for the layoffs, the company departments involved and the number of employees affected.
The legislation would require the labor department of the relevant local government to mediate between the company and its employees. It stipulates that companies who refuse to negotiate would face fines ranging from NT$ 30,000 to NT$150,000.
From January to October this year, about 250,000 people lost their jobs because of a company's closure or restructuring -- accounting for almost half of the 520,000 people now listed as unemployed. More than 2,000 people are currently involved in disputes over layoffs.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
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