About 31 percent of all workers in Taiwan earned less than NT$30,000 per month this year, falling for the eighth consecutive year, according to the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS).
The agency this week published the results of its yearly income survey, conducted in mid-May, which found that 31.47 percent of 8.62 million people in regular employment, or 2.71 million people, earned less than NT$30,000, compared with 44.39 percent in 2009.
Premier William Lai (賴清德) earlier this week said that low-income jobs have been on the decline over the past few years and account for only about 30 percent of total employees.
The decline in low-income earners was due to efforts to boost the economy and improve the job market, Lai said.
DGBAS deputy head Tsai Hung-kun (蔡鴻坤) said that the number of workers who earned less than NT$30,000 a month this year fell by about 220,000, or 2.86 percent, from last year.
The downtrend has continued for eight years in a row, which shows that the wage structure in Taiwan has been changing, Tsai said.
The data also showed that 18.94 percent of employees earned more than NT$50,000 a month this year, compared with 15.99 percent in 2009, marking the eighth consecutive yearly increase.
Tsai said this showed that salaries in Taiwan are on the rise.
Monthly basic wages rose 1.63 percent from last year to NT$38,656, the data showed.
So-called “atypical employees,” who work on a part-time basis or on temporary contracts, totaled 805,000 this year, or 7.11 percent of the total workforce, the highest level to date and up 13,000 from last year, the data showed.
Despite the increase in atypical employees, their share in the total workforce was still lower than in neighboring countries such as Japan and South Korea, where the percentage topped 20 percent, the agency said.
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