Jennifer Ju-shuan Wang, minister of the CLA, made the remarks at the Sanitation, Environment and Labor Committee session of the Legislative Yuan, when responding positively to calls raised by Lawmaker Hou Tsai feng of the ruling Kuomintang.

She said the CLA will work out a new set of criteria governing the extension of relief loans to insured workers within two weeks.

Under the original lending regulations, qualified borrowers for the loans will be confined to those who have been covered by the labor insurance system for at least 15 years and who have settled labor insurance premium payment or labor relief loans. And the maximum loan each qualified insured worker can apply for is set at NT$100,000.

In fact, just a few days ago, Wang said the CLA would continue to grant a total of NT$10 billion in relief loans to 100,000 qualified insured workers at the interest rate of 3.225 percent per annum.

But at yesterday’s committee session, Lawmaker Hou Tsai-feng requested that the total sum of the loans should be doubled to NT$20 billion, given the worsening unemployment on the island.

Hou said the number of qualified applicants for relief loans hit a new high of 100,000 as of December 2007, when the jobless rate stood at 3.83 percent, translating into a jobless population of 414,000.

Now that the unemployment rate has risen to 4.37 percent in October this year, and the number of jobless people surged to 476,000, an increasing number of insured workers are in need of relief loans from the CLA. Accordingly, Hou insisted that total amount of relief loans for workers should be doubled to NT$20 billion so that more insured workers apply for the loans.

Wang immediately accepted Hou’s request, saying that as economic situations are really quite bad this year, she would like to support Hou’s proposal and cut the interest rate in line with the interest rate reductions announced by the Central Bank of China in the second half of this year.

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