The Ministry of Labor (MOL) and the Ministry of Health and Welfare have outlined 12 scenarios where employers must take action in response to an employee being sexually harassed by a member of the public.
Huang Wei-chen (黃維琛), director of the MOL’s Department of Labor Standards and Equal Employment, said yesterday that that while the Gender Equality in Employment Act (性別平等工作法) regulates harassment by employees, harassment against employees by third parties is covered by the Sexual Harassment Prevention Act (性騷擾防治法).
Many kinds of sexual harassment against employees by members of the public can be difficult for employers to investigate, making it necessary for the ministries to outline the 12 interpretive cases covered under the Sexual Harassment Prevention Act, Huang said.
Photo: Lee Chin-hui, Taipei Times
These include public transportation workers being harassed by passengers at their duty stations, medical staff harassed by patients or their families at medical institutions, personal care attendants harassed by the recipients of their services or their families, or security guards harassed by residents, delivery people or visitors.
Verbal or text abuse of customer service operators or social media managers is also considered harassment under the Sexual Harassment Prevention Act, Huang added.
Employers must provide counseling, medical assistance and other forms of support to employees in these scenarios, he said.
However, Wu Tzu-ying (吳姿瑩), executive secretary of the civil society group Modern Women’s Foundation, said that it would be better if the existing regulations in the Gender Equality in Employment Act were clarified, as the ministries’ interpretations might not be accepted by a court.
Wu also expressed concerns that clearly defined cases of sexual harassment might also mislead employers to believe that they would not need to step up prevention measures because administrative powers have already stepped in.
Employers should be provided with more education on their responsibilities to prevent this, she added.
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
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
ALLEGED SABOTAGE: The damage inflicted by the vessel did not affect connection, as data were immediately rerouted to other cables, Chunghwa Telecom said Taiwan suspects that a Chinese-owned cargo vessel damaged an undersea cable near its northeastern coast on Friday, in an alleged act of sabotage that highlights the vulnerabilities of Taipei’s offshore communications infrastructure. The ship is owned by a Hong Kong-registered company whose director is Chinese, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. An unidentified Taiwanese official cited in the report described the case as sabotage. The incident followed another Chinese vessel’s suspected involvement in the breakages of data cables in the Baltic Sea in November last year. While fishing trawlers are known to sometimes damage such equipment, nation states have also
RSS