Employers to be required to pay overdue leave days

The Council of Labor Affairs (勞委會) is to promulgate an updated version of the current enforcement rules of the Labor Standards Law. The new rules will require employers to pay for their staff's overdue annual leave days, officials said yesterday.

Workers are currently eligible for special annual leave days based on the number of years that they have continuously worked for the same employer or business entity.

Workers sometimes fail to take their special annual leaves, either due to the unexpected termination of an employment contract or because the employee simply did not take his or her annual leave before the end of the fiscal year. Such workers will benefit from the council's new enforcement rules.

"The council decided that employers should pay employees who did not take their annual leave days because the latter did contribute their labor to the company on the days that they could actually have taken a break," said Huang Chiu-kuei (黃秋桂), the council's deputy director of labor conditions.

From next January, employees will get paid overtime bonuses in addition to their regular wages for annual leave days that they did not take -- because they contributed extra labor on their holidays, said Yang His-shang (楊錫昇), the labor affairs council's senior analyst.

Yang said the new measures would force employers to request their employees to plan ahead for when they wanted to take their annual leave days. This would help employers to cut down on the amount of money they would have to pay for untaken leave days.

It is the council's responsibility to resolve disputes over whether a laborer should be paid for annual leave days that he or she did not take. Currently, the employer is required to pay if it is to blame for the employee's inability to take the leave days -- such as demanding overtime work when the employee requested to take his or her annual leave days.

Yang added, however, that the council has not decided yet whether to the payments for untaken annual leave days should be included when calculating the employee's average wage -- which would influence the employee's eventual pension payments.

"This is a highly controversial point, as higher eventual pensions may encourage workers to work overtime, rather than resting on their annual leave days. Such a practice would go against the whole idea of providing employees with annual leave days," Yang said.

Seven annual leave days are given to employees who have served the same company for more than one year. Those serving in the same company for more than three years get three extra days. After five years of continuous service the employee gets a total of two weeks paid leave per year. Workers get one additional day of paid leave for each extra year of service after 10 years for a maximum of 30 days.