Taiwan

Wearing black, holding the picture of Kuang, a group of sex workers, COSWAS (Collective of Sex Workers and supporters) members and other labour organizations staged a protest on August 23, in front of the Presidential Office to call for de-criminalization of sex workers and to call for president Chen, former mayor of Taipei City to be responsible for it.

From early middle August, 2006, a former anti-KMT fascism protester ‘Shi-Ming-De（施明德）’ pronounced to have a sit-in protest against Taiwan president “Chen-Shui-Bien（陳水扁）’on 9 of September. He called for people who detested Chen’s scandal to donate 100nt dollars for the cost of the protest, and when the donation reached a hundreds of millions, it would imply that there were millions of people supporting the ‘Depose Bien Headquarter（倒扁總部）. The headquarter will mobilize the demonstration in the ‘Kai-Da-Ge-Lan avenue（凱達格蘭大道）’, which is a well known protesting place in front of the presidential office.

In response to Foxconn's legal prosecution against a reporter and an editor in the First Financial daily because of their reports on the working condition of i-pod subcontracting factory in Shenzhen, First Financial Daily issued an open letter condemning Foxconn.

In the public statement, the First Financial Daily stated:

1. they would support Wang You and Weng Bao in the trial as Wang You was just fulfilling his duty as reporter.

Residents from Tian-Mu（天母）(a community in Shi-Lin Dstrict, north city of Taipei) launched a community-sized protest on Aug/23/2006 at the Taipei city hall. Although the protest was small in scale, it reflected some great problems of plannings in at present Taipei city. And most importantly, one of the organizations in this league, 'Chao-Shan environmental & cutrual alliance（草山生態文史聯盟）'(Chao-Shan is the ancient name of Yangmingshan, Yangming mountain（陽明山）), which is esteblished in 2001 by some housewifes, has successfully stopped many unjust plannings around 'Shi-Lin （士林區） & Bei-Tou district（北投區）' and also 'Yangmingshan National Park（陽明山國家公園）'. The organization becomes rather influential on environmental & city preservation issues.

On chinese "ghost month" (lunar calendar of July), residents of the Lo-Sheng sanatorium (Happy Life Leprosy Sanitarium), a leprosarium built by the Japanese colonial government at 1930s, were burning paper money to the ghost, wishing the sanatorium could be preserved from the construction of metro station.

In the past, patients in the sanatorium were treated like life-time prisoners, and they could not leave the place even after their death. Thousands of the dead peaple were cremated and collected in the pagoda.

On Father's Day, trade union members of International Bank of Taipei(IBT)were demonstrating outside the IBT head office, the usual holiday atmosphere disappeared.

IBT betrayed its earlier promise and merged the company with SinoPac Holding.It would probably result in the layoff of workers.

A Hundred of IBT Union members requested the Financial Supervisory Commission(FSC), i.e.the national finance managment authority, to receive the trade union's petition.

Yahoo! auction site is a very popular portal in Taiwan. With 3.7 million items and the annual transaction value of NT$22 billion (2005), it owns most of the local market. It recently announced that all users will be charged 3% of transaction fees on most of the items. It aroused users' severe complaints and they accused Yahoo! of violating the Fair Trade Act.

"You may go to toilet whenever you want. You may drink water whenever you want."

Once you enter Just Garments, you will find it different from other factories. In Just Garments, with about 100 workers, there is no high wall and repressive labor management; instead the working environment is clean and safe. A good ventilation system is installed and chairs designed according to body mechanics are available. This factory is worker-managed. Workers have cooperation and mutual trust in production line. They see the factory as their homeland.