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Workers march for right despite rain
RIGHT TO WORK: More than 10,000 people joined the rally calling for better protection of workers’ rights and an end to low salaries and hiring of dispatch workers
By Loa Iok-sin / Staff reporter
Workers’ Day protesters clash with police at the Ministry of Labor in Taipei yesterday.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Holding placards, chanting slogans and singing songs, more than 10,000 workers and labor rights advocates yesterday paraded through the streets of Taipei, defying pouring rain and clashing with police as they demanded better protection of workers’ rights.
“One, two, three, push. One, two, three, push,” they chanted.
Upset at what they said was the Ministry of Labor’s long-time neglect of calls for better protection of workers’ rights, as well as Minister of Labor Pan Shih-wei’s (潘世偉) refusal to receive their petition, the demonstrators tried to break the police line in front of the ministry’s headquarters.
“No to low salaries; no to dispatch workers,” others chorused, repeating the slogan that they had been chanting as they marched from Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building to the ministry.
After two waves of clashes, the police and activists compromised, with officers backing down and demonstrators sitting down in front of the police line.
“We are here to tell the government that all workers in the nation are suffering from low wages and the increasing number of businesses hiring dispatch workers. We need the government to do something to really help,” Huang Yu-te (黃育德), secretary-general of the labor rights advocacy group Solidarity, told the crowd.
Huang said that though the government has proposed legislation on dispatch workers, “the proposed bill does not address the problem.”
Hsu Chun-feng (許純鳳), a dispatch worker at Public Television System (PTS), said the government’s legislative proposal was “simply awful.”
“In my case, for example, the proposed bill says that I, as a dispatch worker at the PTS, could become an official employee of the PTS after working as a dispatch worker; however, the law authorizes the PTS to decide whether I could become an official employee,” Hsu said.
“It’s not hard to imagine that the PTS would most likely reject my request and I would remain a dispatch worker, so the law doesn’t change the status quo for me,” Hsu said.
She added that according to the proposed bill, she is officially an employee of the dispatch agency, not of PTS, so she would not be able to join the PTS union.
“Last year, I was an employee of the manpower agency 1111, so, according to the bill, we may form a union for 1111 employees. However, this year, PTS terminated its contract with 1111 and signed a new contract with another dispatch agency, Tecnos. Therefore, if I want to continue to work at PTS, I would have to switch to Tecnos, and I would not be able to continue my membership at the 1111 union,” Hsu said. “[The bill] would just make it easy for employers to get rid of unions by shifting dispatch workers between different agencies.”
Dozens of medical students also joined the march to demand doctors’ right to form unions.
“The Ministry of Health and Welfare insists that doctors are not workers, and, among all medical personnel, doctors are the only ones who are not entitled to the protection of the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) and have no right to form unions,” National Yang Ming University medical student Chen Po-wei (陳帛威) said.
“This has resulted in serious overwork and exploitation by hospitals. Official figures show that a doctor worked an average of 88 hours a week last year,” Chen said.
“Overworked doctors cannot provide quality medical services, so this is bad for both doctors and their patients,” he added.
Other demonstrators in the march included laid-off workers, firefighters, nurses and former freeway toll collectors from across the nation.
Despite the brief clashes in front of the Ministry of Labor, the parade was largely peaceful.
source: Taipei Times
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