Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Kuo-cheng (林國正) said that the government should revise the Labor Pension Act (勞工退休金條例) to provide fairer compensation for employees and security for retired senior citizens.
Lin said he had carefully studied the act and found there were loopholes that put people who retire at age 65 at a disadvantage relative to those who retire at 50.
Under the act, the lump sum retirement payment option pays two months of a person’s insured monthly salary amount for each of the first 15 years of service and one month of that salary for each year of service over 15 years, Lin said.
The maximum payment is 45 months, meaning that somebody who has worked and been enrolled in the labor insurance system for 30 years is eligible for the maximum payout, even if that person retires at the age of 50, Lin said.
Workers who have been employed for at least 30 years and continue to work until they are 65 should see a maximum payout of 50 months of the insured salary level, the legislator said.
He urged the Ministry of Labor to review the Act and draft a revision to take into account his suggestion.
The insured salary level is the monthly salary amount that an employer registers for each employee on which labor insurance premiums are calculated. The maximum salary that can be registered is NT$43,900 per month, regardless of an employee’s actual income.
The monthly insured salary used to calculate a person’s lump sum pension is the average salary registered for labor insurance purposes over the last five years of a person’s employment.
Lin said that in terms of the share of GDP used to compensate employees, Taiwan lags far behind the US, Japan, and South Korea.
Over the past 10 years, the nation’s economic growth averaged 3.97 percent, but salaries have only grown an average of about 0.7 percent per year, he said.
The ministry should provide more security to workers, recognizing the reality that workers have not received a fair share of the added wealth created in the nation over the past decade, the KMT lawmaker said.
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