MOFA stumbles on pay cuts

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is brainstorming ways to curtail its employees' pay amid Taiwan's economic recession, with the first target its locally hired employees in Japan.

"We began to communicate with locally hired employees in Japan on the possibility of scrapping or reducing their year-end bonus," Yang Huang May-hsing (楊黃美幸), vice chairwoman of the ministry's Research and Planning Board, told a press conference yesterday morning.

The foreign ministry official made the statement in the wake of her recent trip to five of Taiwan's representative offices in South Korea and Japan, accompanied by ministry officials in charge of accounting and general affairs.

The move, the official said, was triggered in view of the relatively high pay received by some 50 locally hired employees in Taiwan's representative offices in Japan.

The average monthly pay by these Japanese employees ranges from NT$140,000 to NT$230,000, while the pay scale of their year-end bonus, which amounts to four months' pay, varies from NT$580,000 to NT$920,000, she said.

The ministry has to come up with ways to scale down its expenses, but the ministry's proposal backfired among its employees in Japan, the official said.

"Throughout our communication, some employees have expressed reservations about the idea of scaling down their year-end bonus," she said.

"Some even said they would not rule out the possibility of adopting legal measures to resolve the issue," she said.

Aside from the pay issue, Taiwan's overseas offices in South Korea and Japan have trouble recruiting younger civil servants to replace older local employees, the official said upon completion of her trip in December.

Currently Taiwan's de facto embassy in Japan is the Tokyo-based Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Japan, with branch offices in Yokohama, Osaka and Fukuoka. Taipei's de facto embassy in South Korea is located in Seoul and is called Taipei Mission in Korea.

The official also said her board, the research and development branch within the ministry, has proposed that future personnel allocation in Taiwan's overseas representative offices should be proportional to the extent of the workload in various offices.