The Ministry of Labor has allowed employers to force part-time employees to work for less than the minimum wage by failing to apply new working hour rules, Social Democratic Party (SDP) activists said yesterday.
“Even though we have switched to a 40-hour work week and the minimum hourly wage is supposed to be the minimum monthly wage divided by work hours, the ministry has not adjusted the hourly wage,” SDP Youth Committee convener Lu Yi-ting (呂伊庭) said.
When the reduction in working hours is taken into account, the minimum hourly wage should be NT$126, rather than the current NT$120, Lu added.
Amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) last year cut the number of regular work hours from 84 hours every two weeks to 40 hours per week.
If all of the nation’s 400,000 part-time employees had worked the maximum 35 hours per week, they would have lost the equivalent of NT$134.4 million (US$4.1 million) in wages since the new rules took effect in January, she said.
“It does not take much thought to realize the current NT$120 hourly wage is off,” SDP Policy Committee convener Fan Yun (范雲) said, adding that part-time employees working a full 40-hour week would earn NT$19,200 per month, less than the NT$20,008 minimum wage.
“This is clearly different pay for the same work and helps encourage the current ‘flood’ of part-time workers being pushed to work long hours in place of regular employees,” she said, calling on Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to follow through with her promise to pass legislation that protects part-time workers.
Taiwan Alliance for the Advancement of Youth Rights and Welfare member Wang Ching-wei (王今暐) said that many young part-time workers earn less than the minimum hourly wage because of employers’ arbitrary docking of pay.
Lu said that poor enforcement of the Labor Standards Act and inadequate labor inspections were a problem, particularly outside the major cities in northern Taiwan.
“Many areas in the south and center [of the nation] do not even have a department to conduct labor inspections, with labor relations sections within their departments of civil affairs only responsible for handling national pensions,” she said, adding that a lack of inspections allows some employers to get away with paying less than the minimum wage.
Director of the ministry’s Department of Labor Standards and Equal Employment, Hsieh Chien-chien (謝倩蒨), said activists’ calculations failed to take into account extra work days.
“A month is longer than four weeks,” she said, saying that employees on average work 174 hours per month under the new 40-hour work week rules.
Assuming that part-time employees work standard 40-hour work weeks, they would earn an average of NT$20,880 per month, she said.
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