With the commotion surrounding pension reform, it is becoming necessary to speak from the heart in support of the workers who are remaining silent.
A lot of people have noted that in the current proposal, employees in the public sector who have worked just as many years as a civil servant would not receive more than a maximum monthly pension of NT$30,000, while some would not even get NT$20,000.
However, the minimum a civil servant would receive is NT$32,160. The maximum pension from the labor insurance program would fall far short of the minimum payment for civil servants.
It would be as if elderly people were living in two different countries.
All the many reasons forwarded in the media in support of the high pensions for public servants — military personnel, civil servants and public-school teachers — are wrong. The arguments that they are justified because their exams were difficult, because the military protects the nation and because the work of police officers and firefighters is dangerous are all wrong.
First: Exams and high standards explain how difficult it is to become a civil servant or a teacher, but once they retire, these reasons for a high salary vanish, because they are clearly irrelevant to retirement pay.
Is there any industry where difficult exams and high employee standards are guarantees for high productivity and thus high pay?
There is no economic theory to support this argument, nor is there such an industry in real life.
If it does not even apply to salaries, then it should also be completely irrelevant to pensions. High pay for civil servants and public-school teachers is acceptable if they are highly productive, but once they retire, their productivity drops to zero.
How, then, can the differences in retirement pay be justified?
Second: A pension should allow a retiree the ability to maintain a minimum standard of living.
Other expenses, like travel, should be handled through savings and investments.
This is a fundamental principle, so why can public servants with their high standards not understand that?
Third: Danger, hard work and time away from family are reasons that could apply to any number of professions, including police officers, sailors and flight attendants.
These factors, risks and difficulties are taken into consideration during service and are reflected in salaries.
If people receive high pensions, they are being rewarded twice for the same thing.
Furthermore, after retirement, the risks disappear, and neither security personnel, police officers nor firefighters are productive any more.
Why should security personnel receive lower pensions than police officers?
Fourth: Some people say that military personnel, civil servants and public-school teachers were the most important force behind the nation’s economic development and that without these groups we would not have the economic prosperity and national defense that Taiwan enjoys today.
This is wrong.
With the exception of publicly owned businesses, these groups are part of the consumer services industry — the military and police — or the indirect producer services industry — teachers, for example, who help increase production, but do so indirectly, without participating directly in production.
Workers were the only ones who participated directly in production and economic activities, and they made the biggest contribution to the economy.
To ascribe working class people’s hard work and contributions to the economy to public servants is utterly unjust.
When it comes to national defense, retired generals who go to China to pay obeisance and then oppose pension reform are in no way justified in their stance.
Fifth, the Civil Servants’ Insurance and the Labor Insurance are government-created retirement programs, so why is it that although civil servants and public-sector workers pay taxes, the funds can only be directed to the Civil Servants’ Insurance when it is short of money?
Why are pensions so high for those on the Civil Servants’ Insurance?
Teachers are paying NT$5,000 per month and they get NT$60,000 per month in pensions, so why can the same thing not apply to public-sector workers?
If it is because of differences in the monthly contribution, surely public-sector workers would be happy to make the same monthly contribution.
The problem is that bosses do not think the same way.
This has been a well-known fact for many years, so why has the government been derelict in its duties and not done anything to address the issue?
As to the argument in support of the 18 percent preferential interest rate, that is even more of a ruse.
Pension funds should be regularly allocated. That is the rule for businesses, so why does the government not do the same? If there really is a lack of funds, why does the government not address the problem by issuing some debt to raise funds?
When interest rates are low, why does the government not just abolish the 18 percent interest rate — a mere administrative order — and pay civil servants their pensions directly instead?
Workers have few channels to make their voices heard and they are sometimes less aware of how the government operates.
As a result, public servants have been allowed to enjoy their benefits for too long.
Now that some of their benefits are being cut, they claim all the credit for the nation’s economic growth and national defense.
They are really taking this much too far.
Lin Shiou-jeng is an associate professor at Chung Chou University of Science and Technology’s marketing and logistics management department.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs