Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Jeffhuang0627/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
BUS DRIVER UNIONS have criticized digital punch clocks used for logging hours. In particular, the clocks do not appear to be compatible with the software for their dashboards, preventing error messages from appearing. When disconnected, error messages would reappear.
The government has ordered the digital punch clocks to be installed on 13,000 buses. At the same time, more than twenty buses have been found to be malfunctioning as a result of the digital punch clocks.
This is the latest issue faced by bus drivers in Taiwan, then. Bus drivers are notoriously overworked and under heavy stress to maintain demandingly precise schedules. As such, there have been a number of incidents in past years that are thought to be linked to driver overwork.
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.
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 2024, 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 2024, 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, 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.
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 required 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. Contributing to the issue were lax labor inspections by the Taoyuan Labor Inspections Bureau.
It is unclear as to how the new system using digital punch clocks would prevent such issues. Nevertheless, as can be seen from the rollout, solutions from the government appear to be as top-down as ever, and failing to take into account the working conditions of bus drivers.