The number of Taiwanese working more hours of overtime than allowed by law has steadily increased over the past three years, a Council of Labor Affairs survey showed.
The Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) stipulates that a workday should not exceed 12 hours, and overtime should not exceed 46 hours a month.
About 28 percent of employees said they had worked more than 12 hours a day between June last year and May this year, with 23.8 percent saying they had done so “occasionally” and 4.2 percent saying they had worked those long hours “often,” the survey showed.
That figure represented a rise from last year’s 27 percent.
In terms of job categories, 39.3 percent of employees in the information and communication sector said they sometimes worked more than 12 hours a day in the period from June last year to May this year, the highest among all sectors, followed by 35.1 percent in the finance and insurance sector and 34.5 percent in the healthcare and social assistance sector, the survey showed.
Regarding the number of hours of overtime, there was a 0.5 percentage point increase from last year’s survey.
About 45.8 percent of the respondents said that working overtime has affected their family lives, while 41.1 percent said it has had a negative impact on their health.
The annual survey, conducted by the council in June and July, collected 4,082 valid samples from among 6.67 million local workers enrolled in the country’s labor insurance plan.
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