Over the past few years, Taiwan’s minimum wage has steadily increased, with the intention of raising low incomes and strengthening the social safety net. However, the overall wage system has not kept pace and structural issues are emerging. Not only have full-time salaries failed to rise as fast, some even fall short of their hourly-waged equivalent by up to almost NT$5,000 a month.
This discrepancy represents more than an imbalanced system design; it creates perverse incentives for workers to pursue more precarious positions with greater flexibility and lower responsibility. If this situation goes unaddressed at the institutional level, labor could increasingly gravitate toward short-term, fragmented forms of work — a situation that would risk eroding the foundation of Taiwan’s workforce and reducing companies’ abilities to form stable core teams.
The trend of shunning full-time positions in favor of part-time alternatives is not just a product of wage differentials, but reflects a systemic lack of trust of workers in the benefits that full-time employment offers.
For Taiwan’s younger generation, the image of full-time work has switched from one of stability to one of high demands and low compensation. Costs in the form of long hours, hidden responsibilities, unpaid overtime and high-pressure work environments add up to leech full-time positions of their appeal. In comparison, part-time positions offer clearly demarcated responsibilities, predictable pay and higher degrees of flexibility.
The rise of the gig economy and the normalization of having multiple income streams have seen young people turn away from traditional full-time jobs and toward diverse part-time arrangements. The system aligned minimum hourly wages with monthly salaries, but then went on to create policies that boost hourly wages, resulting in a structural imbalance and leaving employers struggling to provide real incentives for full-time roles.
What appears to be a surface-level labor market phenomenon is a serious warning for policy governance. On one hand, companies that continue to offer low monthly salaries for high-responsibility roles would inevitably struggle to attract talent. If they cannot or are not willing to make adjustments to pay packages, they would find themselves lacking the core talent for industrial upgrading.
On the other hand, the government has failed to review the balance between monthly and hourly pay when raising the minimum wage through executive orders, leading to the wage disparity seen today.
Reforms to government policy and industrial governance must begin with addressing this contradiction. The private sector must reestablish incentives for full-time roles while providing clarity on pathways for employee progression, reasonable working hours and competitive salaries and benefits.
The overall package of full-time positions must reclaim its edge over part-time alternatives. The government must provide wage guidelines differentiated by sector, increase transparency around pay structures and push for work hour reforms to more closely tie labor costs to productivity.
If this structural misalignment remains unaddressed, Taiwan would face sustained labor gaps and fragmentation in the future. When workers choose short-term and part-time contracts over long-term professional commitments, companies would struggle to accumulate technical expertise, industrial upgrading would lag and national competitiveness would suffer.
This is not just a question of where labor chooses to go — it is a warning sign of an urgent need to reform Taiwan’s wage governance system.
Roger Lo is a freelancer.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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