The number of employees in the nation held steady in September from one month earlier at 7.95 million, while the average monthly take-home pay rose 2.11 percent year-on-year to NT$42,757, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The figures suggested a stable workforce, but represented a drop of 67,000 workers from the pre-COVID-19 level, DGBAS Deputy Director Chen Hui-hsin (陳惠欣) told a news conference in Taipei.
“Although Taiwan has kept the virus outbreak at bay, its negative impact lingers,” Chen said.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
The number of employees also shrank 0.47 percent, or by 38,000 people, from the same period last year.
The labor accession rate in September weakened by 0.12 percentage points from August to 2.59 percent, while the labor exit rate softened by 0.1 percentage point to 2.58 percent, the statistics agency said in a report.
That was because the number of people rehired or added to the payroll fell by 9,000 to 206,000, it said.
In the meantime, the number of people who quit, retired or lost jobs dropped by 8,000, it added.
Manufacturing sectors saw the most headcount changes, it said.
The monthly average take-home pay rounded off to NT$42,757 for both domestic and foreign workers, suggesting a 2.11 percent pickup from the level last year, it said.
Adding overtime and performance-based compensations, the total average monthly wage gained 2.41 percent to NT$50,512, it said.
Average working hours totaled 180.9 hours, an increase of 17.7 hours from a year earlier, attributable mainly to more working days this year, the agency said.
Workers at financial and insurance companies registered the biggest increase of 1.47 percent in monthly take-home pay, followed by employees at construction companies with a 1.33 percent raise, the report said.
Staffers at airline companies enjoyed the highest take-home pay of NT$71,232 a month, while those at non-school education facilities had the lowest monthly pay at NT$25,170, it said.
Employees at electronics makers had the highest overall monthly pay of NT$90,082, including bonuses, a 25.58 percent spike from one month earlier, as local suppliers benefited from a boom in business linked to the pandemic.
For the first nine months of the year, average monthly take-home pay increased 1.49 percent year-on-year to NT$42,391, while total monthly compensations edged up 1.74 percent to NT$55,772, the report said.
The Web-based 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) reported similar findings in an annual survey, saying that the average annual pay would reach NT$641,000 this year, a fractional 0.7 percent increase from last year.
Only 2.9 percent of local companies raised monthly wages for employees this year as most of them have adopted a conservative business outlook amid the pandemic, the job bank said.
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