Taipei, July 21 (CNA) Labor union leaders pushed the government Wednesday to enshrine labor rights in a new, or largely amended, constitution.
Union leaders, including Lu Tien-lin, president of the Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions, made the appeal during a meeting with Su Tseng-chang, President Chen Shui-bian's chief of staff. The meeting was part of Su's efforts to solicit opinions from various social quarters about Chen's much-touted constitutional re-engineering plan.
Su told labor union leaders that President Chen, the son of a poor tenant in a rural southern county, has consistently attached great importance to labor rights protection. "It is the president's hope to better protect wage earners' rights to negotiate and reasonably settle disputes with employers and to form labor unions through his constitutional re-engineering plan," Su said.
To collect more grassroots opinions, Su said he will distribute more than 5,000 questionnaires in his own name to solicit views of senior members of various labor unions around the country.
Lu said he hopes labor union representatives will be allowed to take part in drafting labor rights provisions to be enshrined in a new constitution.
He also suggested that the Cabinet-level Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) set up a special task force to study how advanced countries have prescribed labor rights protections in their constitutions and sponsor seminars to discuss the true meaning of enshrining labor rights in a new constitution.
CLA Chairwoman Chen Chu and scores of labor rights scholars and labor union executives were also present at the meeting.
Chen promised that the CLA would hold seminars in various parts of the island and open a Web site for extensive collection of opinions from various social quarters about labor rights provisions in a new constitution.
The meeting with labor union leaders was the third stop of Su's current campaign to solicit opinions about constitutional re-engineering to forge a national consensus on the ambitious reform program.