The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee yesterday said that it would unfreeze the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Bank SinoPac account so it can pay its employees’ salaries and bonuses.
“On the grounds of protecting the rights of the KMT’s employees, the committee will allow it to withdraw from its Bank SinoPac account to pay its employees this month’s salaries and year-end and performance bonuses,” committee Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said after a closed-door “compulsory” negotiation with KMT officials and its employees, which was held at the request of the Taipei Department of Labor.
After the KMT’s account was frozen by the committee last year, it has experienced difficulty paying its employees.
The money from the account should be used to pay salaries and bonuses, while the remainder may be used to pay severance fees and pensions due to a planned mass layoff, Koo said, but added that the KMT cannot use the funds to pay employees it has rehired.
Due to financial difficulties, the KMT in November last year proposed a mass layoff of 738 of its employees by the end of this month before rehiring 310 next month.
The committee is to hold a meeting on Monday before an official resolution on unfreezing the account is made, Koo said.
Asked whether he was worried that KMT employees might storm the committee’s offices, as they stormed the Executive Yuan on Wednesday, Koo said that he failed to see the legitimacy of the intrusion.
The Executive Yuan has decided not to file a complaint against the workers, but said prosecutors might take the matter into their own hands, as the building is a historic site and damaging it is a crime.
The protesters should have known that half of their salaries from November and last month would be transferred today, Koo said, adding that negotiations had been scheduled to address the issues of their salaries and bonuses.
Koo said the “bizarre” event was the result of “information asymmetry,” urging the KMT to facilitate communication with its employees.
Meanwhile, the KMT and its employees failed to reach an agreement on how to calculate severance.
KMT union head Liu Hui-ling (劉慧玲) said the union is against the KMT Administration and Management Committee’s plan to pay permanently laid off workers full severance packages, while only paying 20 percent to rehired employees.
The union has also opposed the KMT’s plan to skirt a statute in its charter that calculates the seniority of employees by including their time in military service, which would affect the size of their pensions, she said.
The party is trying to break the rule, citing dire financial circumstances, she said.
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