Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Jingguang Chen/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
TOUR BUS DRIVERS have announced plans to protest new requirements from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) for tour buses to be installed with GPS trackers and card readers.
The GPS trackers will be used to detect if buses are speeding and the card readers are expected to be used to track how long bus drivers are working. Yet the installation of the GPS trackers will be at the expense of drivers, with this costing 4,000 NT or 160 NT per month. As such, tour bus unions have called for the MOTC to foot the bill for the installation.
The plans by the MOTC are in response to fatal bus accidents in past years. A contributing factor to such incidents are thought to have been overwork by bus drivers.
In February 2017, the causes of a fatal bus accident that killed 33 were linked to the driver being overworked. The bus driver was later found to have been working 16-hour days and to have been working for 18 days consecutively.
Likewise, exhaustion from overwork was thought to be the cause of death of a driver found dead in a restroom in Keelung in January 2018. Overwork may have also been a contributing factor toward the murder-suicide of a bus driver in Taoyuan in 2016 after the driver deliberately started a fire on his bus, killing all of the 26 passengers aboard.
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Indeed, there have been a number of incidents in past years involving passengers hailed as heroes because of coming to the rescue after bus drivers passed out, or bus drivers hailed as heroes for steering their vehicles off the road before passing out.
In February this year, a Keelung bus driver was hailed as a hero for pulling the bus over before he passed out. The bus driver in question later only awoke after a ten-day coma, indicating that he was still working despite the severity of his medical conditions. Other incidents in a similar vein include in January of this year, when a driver’s life was saved because a passenger performed CPR on him after he passed out at the wheel on a freeway near Taichung, a similar incident in September 2022, in November 2021, when a group of army recruits steered a bus to safety in Hsinchu after the driver suffered a heart attack, and in January 2015, when a high schooler that had never driven before managed to steer a bus to safety after the driver fainted.
Similarly, in the past, card readers have proven ineffective in preventing issues of overwork from bus drivers. In 2020, bus drivers working for the Taoyuan Bus Company were found to have been made to fake their working hours by their employers.
Specifically, the Taoyuan Bus Company was requiring that drivers use two sets of USBs in order to avoid their overwork being discovered. Reportedly, some drivers had been working seventeen-hour days for fifteen days at a time. It is also generally known to be an issue that while bus drivers are supposed to be granted one day off per week, they are frequently not allowed to take that day off.
Contributing to the issue were lax labor inspections by the Taoyuan Labor Inspections Bureau. Though the bureau was located only five hundred meters from Taoyuan Bus Company’s bus station, it proved easy to tip off drivers that inspectors were en route to the station, giving them ample time to hide their USB drives. To this extent, the Taoyuan Labor Inspections Bureau is accused of being lax in its inspections, knowing about the labor law violations, but being unwilling to take action regarding them.
The solution from the MOTC, proves a typical one, in that the costs are passed onto employees rather than employers. Likewise, the central issue at hand fails to be addressed given that the solution adds to the burden of those who face labor issues. Despite so much of public transportation relying on them, whether tour buses or city bus operators, bus drivers continue to be overworked in Taiwan.