About 40 employees of the Miramar Golf Country Club in New Taipei City’s Linkou District (林口) on Friday morning went on strike after 15 union members were suddenly fired, forcing the club to shut down for two days.
A day after the passage of controversial amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), the country club fired 15 union members and three other employees.
The company’s union had been urging it to raise salaries and start paying year-end bonuses.
The country club last year hosted the Swinging Skirts LPGA Championship.
A club membership costs millions of New Taiwan dollars, so the club must be able to meet the union’s demands, the Miramar Golf Country Club Union said.
Founded in 2016, the union last year managed to make the company pay workers overtime, it said, adding that the company is now attempting to “wipe out” the union by firing members.
On Monday, the company’s upper management and union members negotiated at a meeting held by the New Taipei City Department of Labor.
The union demanded that the company rehire the fired employees, raise employees’ salaries by 3 percent, provide year-end bonuses amounting to 1.5 times workers’ monthly salary and not use contractors unless agreed upon with the union.
The company rejected all the requests on the grounds that it has been making financial losses.
After the negotiations failed, the union held a meeting, at which 26 of its 37 members voted in favor of staging a strike, union president Huang Cheng-wen (黃正文) said.
The union began the strike at 4am on Friday and set up picket lines at entrances to the country club, preventing customers, employers and employees from entering.
Club vice president Sun Shih-hsung (孫世雄) questioned the legality of the strike, saying that it prevented more than 100 employees from entering the club and forced it to shut down.
However, the labor department said that the strike was legal.
People should respect and sympathize with workers, the department added.
Article 54 of the Act for Settlement of Labor-Management Disputes (勞資爭議處理法) says that a strike is legal if more than half of union members voted to support it.
Additional reporting by Yeh Kuan-yu
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
‘SIGN OF DANGER’: Beijing has never directly named Taiwanese leaders before, so China is saying that its actions are aimed at the DPP, a foundation official said National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) yesterday accused Beijing of spreading propaganda, saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had singled out President William Lai (賴清德) in his meeting with US President Joe Biden when talking about those whose “true nature” seek Taiwanese independence. The Biden-Xi meeting took place on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru on Saturday. “If the US cares about maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait, it is crucial that it sees clearly the true nature of Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in seeking Taiwanese independence, handles the Taiwan question with extra
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
RSS