On Thursday last week, about 115,000 US civil servants, or 5 percent of the US federal government work force, were forced to take a day of unpaid leave because of the budget crunch.
National Federation of Federal Employees president Bill Dougan has expressed concern that if the US congressional standoff over the budget cuts is not resolved, more employees may be forced to take unpaid leave.
In late 2008, then-Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger laid off about 20,000 state employees and temporarily cut the salaries of 200,000 full-time state employees to the federal minimum wage of US$6.55 per hour.
Compared with US civil servants, Taiwanese civil employees are very lucky. Taiwan’s economy has been in dire straits since the financial crisis started and has deteriorated over time. Private-sector employees have been forced to take unpaid leave and some have even lost their jobs.
However, civil servants are under no such threat. The phrase “unpaid leave” is not part of their vocabulary and salary cuts are taboo.
Two years ago, despite a rising national debt, civil servants were given a salary increase of 3 percent, while employees at state-owned CPC Corp, Taiwan, and Taiwan Power Co — both of which have long been operating at a loss — continued to receive annual performance bonuses of between 4.3 and 4.6 months of their salary. They are indeed very lucky.
Last year, the government revised down its annual GDP forecast nine times. Economic growth in the first quarter of this year also fell below the government forecast of 3.26 percent, at 1.54 percent.
Despite this ridiculous performance, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has said that the public should not blame or criticize civil servants because “if we did, who would ever want to become a civil servant?”
The question is, why would anyone not want to be a civil servant? Civil service is an iron rice bowl guaranteeing lifetime employment and benefits.
Ma has also asked: “How will telling an official who made an inaccurate forecast to step down solve the problem?”
One or two mistakes may be chalked down to inaccurate forecasting, but when it happens nine or 10 times in a row, it shows an unwillingness to face up to reality by reporting only the good news while ignoring the bad. With that approach, it will become impossible to solve issues that originally stood a chance of being resolved.
Is it really impossible to fire civil servants, cut their salaries or tell them to take unpaid leave? The US, the world’s biggest economy, has given us the answer to that question.
As Mencius (孟子) said: “Life springs from sorrow and calamity, and death from ease and pleasure.” Does it not apply to civil servants too?
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired associate professor at National Hsinchu University of Education and a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Perry Svensson
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS