More than half of Taiwan’s listed companies plan to raise employee pay this year — by an expected average of 3.5 percent — following last year’s record-high profits, Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Chairman William Tseng (曾銘宗) said yesterday.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus is calling for amendments to the Company Act (公司法), the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Act (中小企業發展條例) and the Factory Act (工廠法) — dubbed the “four laws for pay raises” — that would require businesses in profit to cut employees in by raising pay and giving out bonuses.
Tseng appointed Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp (TWSE, 台灣證券交易所) and the Taipei Exchange (TPEx, 櫃檯買賣中心) to conduct a survey with Taiwan’s listed companies, tasked with learning more detailed information about their plans to raise salaries this year.
The survey showed that a total of 55.6 percent of locally listed companies plan to increase salaries this year, with pay raises averaging 3.5 percent, Tseng said.
Of the 714 companies listed on the TWSE that responded to the commission’s survey, more than 50 percent said they would raise wages this year.
On the TPEx market, 20 percent of the 550 listed companies that responded to the survey said they had already increased wages, while an additional 40 percent said that they are willing to raise pay.
“The commission does not plan to set compulsory rules for the pay raises, as it fully respects that every listed company [in Taiwan] has its own strategy,” Tseng told reporters on the sidelines of a question-and-answer session in a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee.
Tseng said that as the commission is in charge of monitoring listed companies’ operations, it plans to take the survey results into account when mapping out related policies in the future, while denying the survey has anything to do with the issue of pay raises for civil servants.
Meanwhile, National Development Council Minister Woody Duh (杜紫軍) said at the Finance Committee meeting that only after most companies in the private sector hike salaries for their employees would the government consider the possibility of giving civil servants a pay raise.
Last week, a survey released by 1111 Job Bank (1111人力銀行) showed that 71.78 percent of the corporations operating in Taiwan are willing to raise employee salaries and that the increase could average 4.07 percent.
Additional reporting by CNA
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