Ahead of Workers’ Day yesterday, a new poll by an online job bank shed light on the poor working conditions that many Taiwanese office workers face.
In poll results released on Saturday, 77.4 percent of office workers in Taiwan said they felt like they were living a “deprived” life characterized by low income, long hours of work and a lack of sleep.
Conducted by online job bank Yes123, the poll results also show that 63.9 percent of office workers work an average of 10.4 hours a day, with 21.4 percent working more than 11 hours per day, far exceeding the maximum hours allowed by law in Taiwan.
Photo: PATRICK LIN, AFP
The law stipulates an employee should not regularly work more than eight hours a day or 84 hours per two weeks.
Almost 56 percent of office workers said they spent too much time at work, even though as much as 31.8 percent earn less than NT$22,115 per month, the minimum wage for Taiwan recommended by the International Labor Organization based on the country’s cost of living and social welfare schemes.
Yes123 deputy manager Chiu Wen-jen (邱文仁) said the poll results showed that office workers were not getting higher pay for working longer hours, but were instead living “deprived” lives.
In addition, close to 70 percent of office staff said they were not being paid for overtime. Among this group, 47.2 percent work in companies that do not give overtime pay or compensatory leave, 14 percent are entitled only to compensatory leave, and 6 percent are afraid to apply for overtime pay, even though it is offered by their companies.
Long working hours have also affected the sleep of workers. The poll showed office workers, on average, sleep only 6.2 hours per night, less than the seven to eight hours of sleep recommended for adults.
A total of 68 percent of office employees said they are not getting enough sleep, with 37.4 percent considering themselves in poor health.
As a result, some employees said they are prone to fatigue (75.8 percent), absent-mindedness (56.7 percent) and an inability to be creative (19.6 percent).
About 63 percent of office employees said they actually concentrate on work for less than seven hours a day. Based on this statistic, Chiu said companies could achieve a “win-win” situation by thinking of ways to boost employee productivity while limiting their hours of work.
Taiwan’s working hours are the fifth-longest in the world, behind South Korea, Mexico, Hong Kong and India, a 2007 report published by the Lausanne-based International Institute for Management Development showed.
The Yes123 online poll, conducted between April 11 and April 17, collected 2,140 valid samples and has a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 2.05 percentage points.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods