The average monthly take-home wage in March increased 1.56 percent from a year earlier to NT$42,309 (US$1,417), but restaurants, hotels and tourism-related companies cut payrolls to cope with sluggish business caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The latest wage data represented a 0.01 percent decrease from a month earlier, which bucked the seasonal trend for the first time in nearly 40 years, the agency said.
“March’s wages are surprisingly lower than those in February for the first time since 1981,” DGBAS Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) told a news briefing in Taipei.
Chen attributed the change to the pandemic, which has diminished business for restaurants, hotels, travel agencies, retailers and transportation service providers.
In March, 19,000 jobs were lost compared with February, another seasonal twist not seen since the global financial crisis in 2008, Chen said.
Wage data for last month might look worse, as more firms introduced furloughs and pay cuts to make ends meet, Chen said.
As of Friday, 1,047 companies had furloughed 19,000 employees, mostly concentrated in service-oriented businesses and some machinery suppliers, Ministry of Labor data showed.
Take-home pay fell 3.67 percent for employees at travel agencies and shrank 2.99 percent at airlines, while restaurant and hotel workers reported pay reductions of 1.62 percent, the DGBAS report showed.
Machinery makers lowered wages by 1.22 percent and retailers posted a 1 percent drop, it said.
Still, take-home wages edged up from a year earlier because a sizable number of firms, especially in finance, in January increased pay for employees after the nation’s economy showed signs of recovery in the second half of last year, the agency said.
However, the pace of the increase is the slowest since May 2017.
State-run financial institutions have supported the government’s upward revisions of basic wages, the DGBAS said.
Total monthly wages — including overtime pay and bonuses — grew 2.84 percent year-on-year to NT$47,750 in March, it said.
Overall working hours stood at 174.6 hours, an increase of 9.1 hours from a year earlier as there were more working days this year.
For the first quarter, take-home pay increased 1.92 percent to NT$42,329 per month, while total wages climbed 0.82 percent to NT$65,497.
The rates of increase were 1.38 percent and 0.28 percent respectively after factoring in inflation, the agency said.
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