EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) is offering partial pay to encourage its ground personnel to take personal leave from this month, in its latest effort to mitigate the financial impact from plunging passenger traffic due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The carrier announced the program on Tuesday, allowing ground crew members to receive one day’s pay, including base salary and bonus, but excluding meal and transportation allowances, for three days of personal leave.
EVA Air will pay three days of salary at the maximum based on the program, encouraging its staff to take up to 14 days of personal leave per month, it said in a statement.
“As the pandemic has beaten the air travel industry and most of our flights have been canceled, we encourage our staff to take as much personal leave as possible,” a communication officer, surnamed Lin (林), told the Taipei Times by telephone.
While most local companies do not pay for personal leave, EVA decided to pay for part of those days off to help ease workers’ financial concerns, Lin said.
“We hope this will be a win-win solution. The company’s financial burden will be alleviated, while the staff will still have partial income while taking leave,” Lin said.
While Ministry of Labor statistics showed that the number of local workers on unpaid leave had reached 18,265 as of Thursday, Lin said EVA is different from those companies, as it only encourages staff to take personal leave.
Some EVA flight attendants have complained that they should also be able to join the program, but flight attendants already enjoy some benefits that ground staff do not have, such as up to 10 days of paid leave per month, Lin said.
Rival China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) earlier this week announced that it was cutting salaries for staff and management by 15 to 25 percent to weather the crisis.
Shares of EVA dropped 1 percent to NT$9.90 in Taipei trading yesterday, while those of China Airlines edged down 0.14 percent to NT$7.03.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS