Calls to cut work hours and implement two days off work each week have been regular features of political manifestos during national elections in Taiwan over the past dozen or more years.
As long ago as the 2000 presidential election, the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) policy white paper pledged that the party would implement such policies once it was in government.
However, during its eight years in office, the DPP government only amended the statutory regular working time to be 84 hours every two weeks, while it also added a system of eight weeks’ flexible work time and four weeks’ redistributable work time.
Similarly, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in its policy white paper for the 2008 presidential election loudly called for two days off per week. However, while the KMT also had eight years in government, it was not until June of last year that it approved an amendment cutting regular work time to a maximum of 40 hours per week and that amendment did not come into force until Jan. 1.
What different political parties have in common is that they all go from shrillness at election time to pragmatism once they have been voted into government. On the one hand this shows how much the public cares about amending the law regarding work hours, while on the other it demonstrates how those in government have to take a sober approach to people’s lives, the labor market and economic development.
Various parties made proposals for the latest round of amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), each putting forward what they saw as the best solution regarding work hours — be it the DPP’s “one fixed day off and one flexible day off,” the KMT’s “flexible two fixed days off a week” or the New Power Party’s (NPP) “strict two fixed days off a week.”
On Dec. 6, the amendments to the act passed their third reading in the legislature. The outcome is a compromise between the proposals. It keeps the DPP’s “one fixed day off and one flexible day off” as the core idea, incorporates the KMT’s proposal of “flexible two fixed days off a week” with graded overtime pay and retains the NPP’s suggestion that workers must get at least 11 hours’ rest between shifts, which is modeled on a similar regulation in the EU.
As for labor groups’ demand for holidays, the amendments handle them in the form of paid annual leave days. It would appear that opinions from all sides have been integrated into the wording of the amendment that passed the third reading, bringing an end to the political controversy.
However, will these complicated regulations be comprehensible to the workers and employers to whom the law actually applies?
I am often called upon to travel the nation and explain labor laws and regulations and I have discovered a serious problem: Regulations concerning work hours and the calculation of overtime pay in the act are so complicated that employers and human resources managers often fail to arrange shifts and pay wages in the proper way.
Workers, for their part, are not clear about how to work out what they are entitled to. Even more confusing, labor inspection standards vary from place to place, so that workers or employers get inconsistent answers when they make inquiries at labor administration authorities.
None of the political parties have given much thought to this problem in their handling of the amendments.
If regulations were made applicable to specific professions, then they would likely be highly specialized and complicated without being difficult to implement.
However, the act applies to as many as 9 million workers and their employers, while nearly 1 million Taiwanese companies are small and medium-scale enterprises with fewer than 30 employees.
Added to the rules that were already in the act, the amendments might make it even harder for ordinary workers and employers to have a clear understanding of the law.
This will be unhelpful when expecting employers to implement the regulations and it will not help workers clearly understand their rights.
Next time major amendments are made to the act, government officials, legislators and interest groups should think about whether they should get more closely in touch with people’s lives, because they do not need an act that is long on attitude, but short on systems.
Liu Shih-hao is a professor in Ming-Chuan University’s Faculty of Law.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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