The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday rejected a claim by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) vice-presidential candidate Jennifer Wang (王如玄) that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration is more concerned about workers than the former DPP administration, because it raised the minimum wage more times.
Wang said that the Ma administration raised the minimum wage five times since 2008, while the DPP administration raised it once from 2000 to 2008, adding that the Ma administration did not know how to promote its efforts compared with the DPP.
DPP spokesperson Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) said that real wages have fallen back to 1999 levels and the income gap has surged over the past seven years.
The constant real wage last year was NT$36,749, lower than the 1999 level at NT$37,277 when the DPP was in government, Cheng said.
According to research by Academia Sinica members Hu Sheng-cheng (胡勝正) and Cyrus Chu (朱敬一), the income gap between the top 5 percent and the bottom 5 percent households rose from 55 times in 2005 to 99 times in 2013, while Cheng said that income distribution has deteriorated, because economic gains have been mostly reaped by rich people.
Wang, as a former minister of labor, has been evading the issue of falling wages, and her remark showed her lack of honesty and the Ma administration’s inability to reflect on its ineffective policies that caused low wages and an unfair accumulation of wealth, Cheng said.
Wang should admit that low wages are caused by the 22k policy — which subsidizes the monthly salary of NT$22,000 for college graduates — implemented in 2010 when she was the minister of labor, Cheng said.
Cheng said that Wang’s claim that the KMT’s efforts have gone underreported is contrary to the public perception of the party,
Meanwhile, another DPP spokesperson, Wang Min-sheng (王閔生), rejected media reports that the party ignored the cross-strait trade in goods agreement with China as the party has shifted its focus on the Jan. 16 presidential and legislative elections.
The DPP’s stance over the trade in goods agreement is that any cross-strait agreement should be supervised with a cross-strait oversight mechanism.
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