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.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS