The Ministry of Labor (MOL) and the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) jointly organized the “2021 Corporate Integrity Forum” on November 9th. In addition to Taiwan's constructional-related industries participating in the forum, the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE) also shared UK’s experiences in corporate integrity to promote good governance in occupational safety and health (OSH). We also invited Simon Buttery, the Chief Executive Officer of Continental Engineering Corporation and Jacey C.H Lee, Deputy General Manager of Chimei Corporation to deliver keynote speeches. Tzu-Lien Tzou, the Director-General of Occupational Safety and Health Administration, MOL, Ming-Chian Cheng, the Director-General of Agency Against Corruption, MOJ, Cheng-Chang Hsu, the Director-General of Directorate General of Highways ,MOTC, Lynn Li, Head of Infrastructure British Office Taipei, and Transparency International Chinese Taipei Vice Chairman, Kevin I. J Yeh participated in the panel discussion.

The forum focused on corporate operation in good faith, occupational safety laws and regulations compliance to create mutually beneficial relationships between workers, enterprises, and the governments.

Minister of MOL Ming-Chun Hsu remarked, construction engineering plays an important role in national infrastructure development and economic prosperity. However, due to the complexity of division of professional labor in projects and long-duration of the construction period, the risk of occupational accidents of the construction industry is higher than other industries. The MOL has announced that 2021 is the year for reinforcing the reduction of occupational construction accidents; therefore, in addition to implementing and increasing inspection powers and imposing rigorous penalties, we established the State-Owned Enterprises Inter-Ministerial Risk Reduction Platform to strengthen the efficacy and efficiency of public construction safety management. Also we develop the Occupational Safety and Health Digital Learning Platform to enhance labors’ ability in identifying occupational hazards and labors’ OSH knowledge, and at the same time appeal to company owners that integrity operation and compliance are indeed the demonstration of corporate social responsibility.

The construction industry plays an important role in Taiwan’s economic development. We expect business owners to act with integrity, commit to and be responsible for the well-being of society, strive to protect the workers’ safety and health, and create a better working environment; thereby these can establish mutually beneficial relationships, enhance competitive advantages, and achieve business integrity management at the same time.

 The theme of this forum is “Compliance in the Construction Industry to Reduce Accidents and Create a Win-Win Situation for Workers, Enterprises and Governments With Transparency and Integrity”. Through the experiences shared by UK and the benchmark enterprises in Taiwan, we discussed the issues related to the construction industry as follows: the trends of compliance for reducing occupational accidents and corporate integrity management , the advantages of benchmark learning and integrity governance, as well as public-private cooperation in establishing working environment with high quality. With the participation of the Minister of MOL, the Minister of MOJ, and the construction industry business owners in this cross-domain mechanism, forging consensus to jointly implement the goals above, we hope to create a safe workplace and friendly working environment.