| Summary: | 碩士 === 義守大學 === 醫務管理學系碩士班 === 98 === In Taiwan, the Labor Standard Law has been taken into effect in 1984, and medical service institutions have been included within the scope of this law since 1998. However, this law is not applicable for nurses and paramedics working in public hospitals. The main purpose of the Labor Standard Law is to protect employees’ basic working rights from being oppressed by their employers. It also cause an increase in the management and operation costs of the enterprise. The main objective of this research is to explore the extent to which the working conditions and labor rights of the Taiwanese nurses have been improved as well as to realize their practical working situation under the Labor Standard Law. This research examines the differences between public hospitals and private ones, and also draws comparisons between different scales of hospitals. In addition, we also bring in the analysis of trade union in this research, and evaluate whether a trade union could help to gain much improvement in nurses’ working conditions.
This research adopted qualitative method to collect data and focused on four kinds of hospitals – public hospital without trade union, public hospital with trade union, private hospital without trade union and private hospital with trade union. Based on snowballing sampling, we conducted, it took 13 semi-structured interviews including 10 nurses, 2 doctors and 1 medical technician from March to April 2010. The structure of the interview is based on the regulations stipulated in the Labor Standard Law consisting of work contract, wage, working hour, rest time, vacation and female workers’ protection. Comparisions of nurses’ working conditions between different types of medical institutions were made.
It is indicated that most nurses did not own any right for bargaining their work contracts and salaries. Because of nursing responsibility system, many nurses were obliged to bear overtime with no pay. Also, different hospitals have different standards of overtime pay. Some nurses indicated that the hospital may willfully rearrange their vacations in order to make the best use of elastic manpower. In general, for the nurses working in public hospitals and are covered by the Labor Standard Law, their working conditions by and large conformed to the regulations of the Law, and even for those who are not covered by the Law. By comparison, private hospitals usually followed the internal managerial rules of their own, which commonly not conform to the Labor Standard Law. Trade unionhave played a role in inducing the Law to function within the hospital, in that nurses’ working conditions could be improved, such as the length of vacation, welfare and subsidies, and overtime payment etc.
The implementation of the Labor Standard Law may increase personnel cost for a hospital; however, bad working condition can bring much negative influences in human resourse management. We suggest that hospitals may look for appropriate channels for making earnings, decrease unnecessary expenses, and therefore contribute to the enhancemenet of nurses’ working conditions and welfare. Furthermore, the government should strengthen their supervision on working conditions and labor relations. In terms of education, medical workers and managers should learn more about the Labor Standard Law and trade union. By this way, the role of workers may be turned from passive into active, and the interaction between employers and employees may become more equal. To this end, stable operation may become a common goal for the whole industry.
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