An ongoing labor shortage in hotels and restaurants is due to low wages rather than imbalanced supply and demand, the Ministry of Labor said yesterday.
The ministry made the remarks after Grand Hyatt Taipei (台北君悅大飯店) general manager Will Chen (陳慶隆) on Wednesday told reporters that the five-star facility is looking at a rapid recovery in business next year.
However, the lack of staff is slowing the pace, he said.
Photo courtesy of Caesar Park Hotels and Resorts
Formosa International Hotels Group (晶華酒店集團) chairman Steve Pan (潘思亮) earlier said its flagship property, the Regent Taipei (台北晶華酒店), had to turn down reservations for thousands of banquet tables due to understaffing.
About 58 hotels have about 380 vacant positions, but only 37.4 percent meet wage expectations, the ministry said, adding that there is ample room for improvement if companies want to resolve the situation.
The ministry said it had launched rounds of matching campaigns, and concluded that wage expectation gaps account for the understaffing issues in the hospitality sector.
Hotels have pressed the government to ease regulations regarding hiring migrant workers, as it is currently limited to the manufacturing, construction, agriculture and fishing sectors, as well as caretaker positions.
The service sector comprises 60 percent of employment in Taiwan, and there are many potential workers available locally to work at hotels and restaurants, the ministry said.
Hospitality operators should lower their qualification requirements or raise compensation to attract applicants to vacancies, it said.
Dependence on low-paid migrant workers is not healthy for the industry or society, it added.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the