The third quarter every year is when the Ministry of Labor’s Minimum Wage Review Committee holds its annual meeting. Around the same time last year, President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration raised the full-time minimum wage by 5 percent, from NT$20,008 to NT$21,009, and the hourly minimum wage from NT$125 to NT$133.
It was the biggest single-time increase in the nation’s minimum wage in eight years, even though many business representatives refused to attend the meeting to show opposition to the plan.
On Friday, the Ministry of Labor’s Minimum Wage Review Committee proposed that the minimum wage be raised by 4.72 percent to NT$22,000 per month and to NT$140 per hour from January next year.
There have been many bills aimed at reducing the problem of excessive work hours — a problem that has long plagued Taiwan’s workers — including a bill in 2000 that limited work to 84 hours per fortnight, a bill in 2015 that put the maximum at 40 hours per week and last year’s five-day workweek bill.
This shows that the government has been working for years on reducing the annual work hours.
While the ruling and opposition parties agree that the nation’s excessive work hours need to be reduced, the next challenge is tackling extremely low wages, which are the result of an economy built on exploitation.
This has not only led to a brain drain, but has also had a far-reaching impact on the nation’s population, economy and maintenance of the social welfare system.
Other problems, including the increased influence of corporations, the dwindling birth rate and poverty, as pointed out by the Taiwan Labor Front in 2011, have also been getting worse in the past five years.
The simplest and most effective way to ensure more reasonable wages is through legislation. This is not only supported by workers’ rights groups: The government and the opposition parties agree, and it was also part of Tsai’s election promises.
The New Power Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) have proposed their own version of a minimum wage act.
Both versions make it clear that the minimum wage needs to be significantly raised. However, despite the endless talk, the Democratic Progressive Party has yet to come up with a draft proposal.
Because of the party’s inaction, this year’s minimum wage adjustment had to follow the same procedure as last year. It remains unknown whether the government will ever deliver on Tsai’s campaign promise of passing a minimum wage act.
It is worth noting that the KMT version of the minimum wage act does not protect foreign blue-collar workers. Such a design ignores foreign workers’ human rights, and it will be strongly opposed by labor groups.
As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has said, wages are not entirely determined by the market. In fact, unequal wages are often the result of choices made by political groups or other social forces.
Many employer organizations have demanded that the government prioritize amending the five-day workweek and raising the wages of public servants in an attempt to delay its plan to increase the minimum wage, a method of political manipulation that has been successful.
Taiwan must give serious consideration to the fundamental factors in the nation’s political and economic structure that have kept wages so low for the past dozen or more years, despite three transitions of power.
The government must draft a minimum wage act that ensures wages across the country are transparent and meet the demands of the public. This is the only way that Taiwan will be able to cast off the low-wage curse.
Son Yu-liam is secretary-general of the Taiwan Labor Front.
Translated by Yu-an Tu
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