The government is releasing economic data that paint a much rosier picture than the actual economic situation, labor activists said yesterday.
They said that after taking inflation into account, the nation’s workers had seen their wages shrink to a level last seen about 12 years ago, a phenomenon they said was giving rise to a “working poor” population.
Taiwan Labour Front secretary-general Son Yu-lian (孫友聯) said that while the government was patting itself on the back on statistics pointing to falling unemployment, those numbers did not present an accurate picture of the state of the job market.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
In fact, workers’ purchasing power has been on the wane and the work environment has been deteriorating, he said.
“Taiwanese workers have seen the level of their real salaries fall back to what it was 12 years ago,” Son said.
Even without taking into -account changes in the consumer price index, which shows that “everything has gone up, except workers’ paychecks,” Son said workers’ salaries last year were 9.6 percent less than in 1995.
“The job market is in a dire state,” Taiwan Labor and Social Policy Research Association executive director Chang Feng-yi (張烽益) told the press conference. “The government should stop ‘feeling good about itself’ and start attending to the public’s needs.”
One example of unemployment numbers not telling the whole story is that last year, 530,000 people worked less than 35 hours per week, or 6.6 times more than the 80,000 people who were not full-time workers in 2004, Son said.
Son said unemployed workers were finding it increasingly difficult to look for jobs, with the average job seeker requiring as long as 30.72 weeks to find employment. Even those with a good education are not immune to unemployment, with about 41 percent of the -unemployed holding at least a bachelor’s degree, he said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Sue-ying (黃淑英) also participated in the press conference.
“The government is setting a bad example by hiring lots of contract workers, while failing to protect workers’ rights,” she said, adding that temporary and dispatch workers were becoming increasingly common as corporations seek to minimize hiring costs and are indifferent to the protection and welfare of employees.
The activists said they were concerned that should the government continue to ignore such troubling indicators of deteriorating job market conditions and only concentrate on superficial unemployment figures, the nation would soon be filled with the “working poor” — workers who work themselves to death, never having any savings.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet yesterday approved a proposal that targets limiting the unemployment rate to less than 4.9 percent and increasing employment by 1.8 percent this year, Council of Labor Affairs Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) said.
“After a set of temporary and long-term job-boosting programs have been implemented since the financial crisis, unemployment has become a less severe problem,” Wang told a press conference following the Cabinet meeting.
Wang cited the ratio of job opportunities to job seekers as proof, saying the ratio rose from an average of 0.6 in 2009 to 1.3 last year.
“The situation has changed from about two job seekers vying for one job to one job seeker having more than one job opportunity,” she said.
However, “it remains a problem for job seekers to find employers who have job opportunities that match their skills,” Wang said.
Government statistics showed unemployment last month was 4.67 percent, or about 520,000 people.
Taiwan’s unemployment rate last year was 5.21 percent, the second-highest since records began, second only to the 5.85 percent recorded in 2009.
To keep unemployment below 4.9 percent this year, the government needs to help about 100,000 people find employment, Wang said.
She said government agencies would continue to grant subsidies to small and medium-sized enterprises hiring new workers, enhance job-placement services and help the unemployed start their own businesses.
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