Accompanied by members of the Youth Labor Union 95, a former part-time employee of the Control Yuan, who asked to be identified only by the surname Chen, yesterday accused his former employer of violating the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
“I started working for the Control Yuan in May last year, but realized only in March that the Control Yuan did not list my name under the labor insurance coverage until October,” Chen told reporters at the group’s headquarters in Taipei.
Employers are required by law to register employees for labor insurance and pay part of their fees.
“I told my superior that they may have violated the Labor Standards Act on April 1, but they said that they didn’t know about the regulations and would check and get back to me,” Chen said. “So far, I haven’t heard anything.”
Besides the labor insurance issue, Chen said that the Control Yuan had never paid him for overtime or for working on public holidays.
Youth Labor Union 95 executive member Liu Yu-hsueh (劉侑學) said that the Control Yuan owed Chen for unpaid overtime and for working on holidays.
Chen also said that the Control Yuan had asked all its part-time employees to sign a set of regulations with clauses that violated the Labor Standards Act.
“My supervisor, a senior Control Yuan secretary named Wang Hsin-hsien [王新憲], handed the regulations to us, asked us to sign on the spot, and called our names one by one to turn in the signed paper,” Chen said.
“When I refused to sign it right away and told him I needed some time to go over it and think about it, he said that those who didn’t want to sign didn’t need to come to work the next day,” he said.
A copy of the regulations that Chen showed at the press conference said the Control Yuan could “terminate employment at any time if [the part-time employee] does not follow the rules, performs poorly or shows a bad attitude toward assignments given by a Control Yuan employee.”
The regulation also required part-time employees to give two weeks’ notice before resigning.
“This is obviously illegal,” Liu said. “The Labor Standards Act specifically lists conditions in which an employee can be fired, and none of the situations in the [Control Yuan] regulations meet the conditions in the law.”
Liu said the act only requires an employee to tender his or her resignation 10 days in advance.
Wang rebutted all the accusations when contacted by the Taipei Times.
“We give [part-time employees] more severe regulations because we want them to follow the rules, but if they don’t, we won’t handle it according to our own regulations. We’ll still follow the law,” Wang said.
He denied having told Chen not to come to work the next day if he didn’t sign the regulations.
“As for the labor insurance issue, I think there’s a misunderstanding, but I’m not too sure exactly what happened,” Wang said, adding that he would investigate the matter to find out what went wrong.
Liu said that they had reported the case to Taipei City’s Department of Labor.
“They will send people to the Control Yuan to investigate by Monday at the latest,” he said.
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Taiwan’s population last year shrank further and births continued to decline to a yearly low, the Ministry of the Interior announced today. The ministry published the 2024 population demographics statistics, highlighting record lows in births and bringing attention to Taiwan’s aging population. The nation’s population last year stood at 23,400,220, a decrease of 20,222 individuals compared to 2023. Last year, there were 134,856 births, representing a crude birth rate of 5.76 per 1,000 people, a slight decline from 2023’s 135,571 births and 5.81 crude birth rate. This decrease of 715 births resulted in a new record low per the ministry’s data. Since 2016, which saw
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of