The nation’s major electronics companies yesterday sought to extend their right to greater flexibility over employee working hours to combat an industrial slump, a move that follows new government restrictions on firms sending staff on unpaid leave.
In a meeting initiated by the government, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) discussed with top executives from local tech firms possible measures to help employees and employers ride out the difficult times as the European debt crisis and weak US economy continue to hurt demand for locally made electronic products. The topic of unpaid leave became the center of the discussion.
To cope with seasonal customer demand, Lee Kun-yao (李焜耀), chairman of LCD panel maker AU Optronics Corp (友達), suggested the government move away from the rigid 84 working hours every two weeks and allow flexibility in arranging the annual 2,184 working hours in accordance with each businesses’ needs, according to a statement released by an association of major electronics manufacturers in Hsinchu.
The government should revise the existing labor laws to better suit reality, given that exporters’ employment needs vary with customer demand, Lee said.
In Germany and the UK, firms use “working hours” accounts and other mechanisms to make working hours more flexible, Lee said.
During the 2008 downturn, more than 400 local companies forced their employers to take more days off than usual to cut labor costs and as an alternative to eliminating jobs. About 180,000 workers were affected at the time, Lee said.
The Ma administration stepped in this week to restrict companies from forcing employees to take unpaid leave as long as the firms were still profitable, raising opposition from several companies. However, Ma yesterday reiterated the government’s determination to enforce the new labor rule.
Lu Ming-kuang (盧明光), chairman of solar wafer maker Sino-American Silicon Products Inc (中美晶), said it would be feasible to reduce working hours during a downturn and to allocate those hours to overtime when businesses returned to normal. This way, employers would not have to cut jobs, while employees would not suffer from reduced wages, he said.
Corporate executives from 17 companies attended the meeting yesterday, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman and CEO Morris Chang (張忠謀), United Microelectronics Corp honorary vice chairman John Hsuan (宣明智) and MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Tsai Ming-kai (蔡明介).
MediaTek Inc, the nation’s biggest handset chipmaker, urged the government to accelerate the release of bandwidth for local telecoms operators to deploy their fourth-generation Long Term Evolution networks, which can deliver data downloading at least 10 times faster than 3G.
Tsai said that new smartphones and cloud-based computing services need to be delivered or transmitted over LTE network and he suggested the government could help local WiMAX operators to consolidate and migrate to build LTE networks as that is the mainstream network now.
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