End-of-year bonus payment amounts topped a list of unwanted questions at family Lunar New Year dinners, a survey showed on Thursday.
The poll, conducted from Jan. 1 to Saturday last week by online job bank yes123, showed that 40.2 percent of respondents said they loathed being asked how much they received for their end-of-year bonus, making it the most unwanted question among salaried workers.
Questions about salaries, employment type and place, marriage plans, and relationships were disliked by 38.6 percent, 36.5 percent, 33.8 percent and 30.1 percent of respondents respectively, it showed.
Photo: Li Ya-wen, Taipei Times
Topics regarding home or car ownership, plans to have children, job security and affability of supervisors, matchmaking offers, or observations of weight change were disliked by 27.6 percent, 26.3 percent, 25.1 percent and 18.7 percent of respondents respectively, it said.
About 60 percent said that giving “red envelopes” — gifts of cash customary for the season — causes financial distress, the poll showed.
Of the people who were short of funds for red envelopes, 70.7 percent said they planned to work a side job, while 44.3 percent said they would borrow from parents, 34.1 percent said they would borrow from a bank and 29.2 percent said they would borrow from colleagues.
The poll showed that cutting January paychecks ahead of schedule and giving paid leave to workers who need to travel home could be effective ways for employers to alleviate distress, yes123 spokesman Yang Tsung-pin (楊宗斌) said.
Preferably, end-of-year bonuses should be handed out with the monthly salary check, while overtime during the Lunar New Year holiday should be discouraged, Yang said.
The poll received 1,108 valid responses and had a margin of error of 3.43 percentage points.
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