The Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) plans to revise the law to increase the fines businesses will be subject to if they abuse “the system of job responsibility” and ignore the health of their employees.
The Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) currently stipulates that if employers abuse the system, they can be fined a maximum of NT$60,000. Critics have wondered how an employee’s health could be worth so little, especially in light of a string of recent deaths at high-tech companies related to overwork.
“For some rich bosses, they seem to ignore such small fines,” Council of Labor Affairs Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) said. “Because of that, the CLA is advocating revising existing regulations. Fines should be increased at least threefold, so that business owners abide by the law more strictly.”
The council hopes to send a draft of the planned revision to the Executive Yuan for approval by the end of this month. If the Executive Yuan gives it the green light, it still has to be passed by the Legislative Yuan before it can take effect.
Wang said it was the responsibility of her council to make sure -companies did not pressure employees to work overtime against their will on the basis of the so-called “system of job responsibility.”
Under the task-based system, used heavily in the high-tech sector, employees work until specific tasks are completed rather than pre-set office hours, resulting in work hours far in excess of the maximum 84 hours every two weeks allowed under the Labor Standards Act.
However, an amendment passed in 1996 exempts certain workers from the eight-hour work rule as long as they reach prior agreement with their employers as to how many hours they should spend on the job.
Recent measures adopted to allow overwork to be classified as the cause of an occupation-related death defined “long-term overwork” as 92 hours of overtime in the month before death or 72 hours of overtime per month for two to six months prior to death.
According to the latest CLA statistics, the average Taiwanese worker put in 2,156 hours on the job in 2008, or roughly 43 hours per week, which was 20 percent more than workers in Japan and 50 percent more than those in Germany.
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