A news story about a Taiwanese college graduate who turned his back on his financial training and chose instead to take a better-paid temp job as a butcher in an Australian slaughterhouse set off a heated debate last week about Taiwan’s grim job market and massive youth unemployment.
Those discussions led to the question: “Is Taiwan becoming a labor exporter?”
If the answer is yes, then it represents a major change to the country’s job market and puts the country’s ambition of joining the ranks of developed economies like Japan and South Korea at odds with reality.
The story was first published by the Chinese-language weekly Business Today. The 27-year-old student told of his horrifying experience working in an Australian abattoir where he was saving up to repay student loans and to earn money for the future. He said he was willing to work in such an extreme environment for the high salary it offered. He estimated that he could earn NT$1.25 million (US$42,600) a year in Australia, while at home a college graduate can only expect to earn about NT$320,000 a year — just over one-quarter of his Australian earnings.
This story is an extreme case, but it reflects the prevalence of high unemployment among Taiwan’s elite, who have struggled to find work with decent pay. Jobless figures highlighted this phenomenon, with youth unemployment hovering at nearly 13 percent in July, compared with an average 4.31 percent in Taiwan generally, based on the statistics from the Director-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS).
Young people with a bachelor’s degree are forced to turn to blue-collar jobs or an occupation with low social status, such as plumbing, to make a living.
For those not fortunate enough to have the backing of a wealthy family, young people from low income bracket backgrounds are presented with the “not-too-bad option” of making quick money by working overseas.
“To keep money coming in, we have to do jobs that most Australians are unwilling to do,” the student slaving away in the slaughterhouse said.
What is happening to Taiwan’s job market anyway? Is it a waste of national educational resources for a college graduate to do an unskilled job? What caused this drastic and structural change to Taiwan’s job market?
Except for the economic slump and oversupply of college graduates, the mindset of local corporate executives’ are also crucial. They are so proud of their cost-cutting abilities that they cannot give up this cost advantage to make money.
This sort of mindset has suppressed the wage growth for both white-collar and blue-collar jobs, with Taiwanese firms unwilling to give, and unable to afford, pay raises.
Taiwan’s average annual income for people aged between 30 and 34 years of age has actually declined and now stands at NT$556,000 — a 17-year low according to DGBAS figures.
More than that, it is pathetic that the Cabinet shelved a proposal by the Council of Labor Affairs to raise the minimum monthly wage to NT$19,047 next year from the current NT$17,680.
With hopes of a wage rise looking slim in the short term, or even in the long run, it seems to be that Taiwan is losing talent and that of course means it is losing its global competitiveness and economic strength.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS