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.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
PRESSURE EXPECTED: The appreciation of the NT dollar reflected expectations that Washington would press Taiwan to boost its currency against the US dollar, dealers said Taiwan’s export-oriented semiconductor and auto part manufacturers are expecting their margins to be affected by large foreign exchange losses as the New Taiwan dollar continued to appreciate sharply against the US dollar yesterday. Among major semiconductor manufacturers, ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光), the world’s largest integrated circuit (IC) packaging and testing services provider, said that whenever the NT dollar rises NT$1 against the greenback, its gross margin is cut by about 1.5 percent. The NT dollar traded as strong as NT$29.59 per US dollar before trimming gains to close NT$0.919, or 2.96 percent, higher at NT$30.145 yesterday in Taipei trading
RSS