Civilian staff at the Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology (CSIST) will be stripped of their performance bonus starting this Lunar New Year, defense sources said yesterday.
The military staff of the CSIST will still receive the performance bonus denied to their civilian counterparts.
The CSIST bonus is the equivalent of between one and two times the monthly pay, and is different from the standard Lunar New Year bonus, which is not based on work performance but acts as a gift.
Though deprived of the performance bonus, civilian staff will still receive their Lunar New Year bonus, which is one-and-a-half times their monthly pay.
The change was not welcomed by the civilian staff, who consider themselves to make the same contribution to the institute as military personnel.
An official with the Ministry of National Defense, who asked not to be identified, said the civilian staff of the CSIST were denied the work performance bonus because they were not qualified public servants.
"These civilian workers are actually hired employees. They are not public servants. It is the Ministry of Audit that has decided to deny them the bonus," the official said.
The CSIST refused to comment, though a senior official at the CSIST privately said it was not that they were not concerned about the issue, but that they had other, more important things to worry about.
"The CSIST is now faced with internal and external pressure to make structural changes over the next few years. We're going to be broken up into three different parts. Who knows what will happen then?" the official said.
The seeming nonchalance of the CSIST toward its civilian staff has angered many of those affected.
A civilian who works as an engineer at the CSIST said he chose to work for the CSIST at a time when the institute was in urgent need of talent from outside the military.
A lot of people joined the CSIST as employees without expecting that years later they would suffer this kind of treatment, the engineer said.
They used to enjoy high pay and tax exemptions, but now all these benefits had been taken away from them, the engineer said.
In recent years, a large number of civilian engineers has opted to leave the CSIST for jobs in the private sector or abroad. The remaining engineers must now suffer the humiliation of being denied an annual performance bonus.
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