Minimum-wage workers in Taipei can only afford 5 percent of the places for rent in the city and most of them are single rooms in shared apartments, research conducted by the Taiwan Labor Front (TLF) found.
Taipei has the least houses for rent that people earning a NT$22,000 per month minimum wage can afford, followed by New Taipei City at 18 percent, TLF director of research Hung Ching-shu (洪敬舒) told a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
Tainan, at 60 percent, has the most affordable accommodation, he said.
The researchers defined monthly rent of NT$6,600 or below as affordable for minimum-wage workers, because it is generally considered reasonable to spend no more than 30 percent of one’s income on rent, Hung said.
Of the houses that are affordable in Taipei and New Taipei City, 80 percent are single rooms in shared apartments and 23.8 percent are rooftop structures that were added onto buildings after construction, he said.
Contrary to the belief that rooftop structures are cheaper, the study found them to be more expensive and less safe due to the materials that are often used to build them, he added.
For the same price, renters in Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung are likely to be able to afford a studio apartment, he said.
While Taipei and New Taipei City are more expensive to live in, cities in southern Taiwan tend to have more restrictions, Hung said.
For examples, landlords are more likely to require their tenants to be women, employed and without pets or to ban them from cooking in the apartment, he said.
The findings highlight the need for the government to improve the way it determines the minimum wage to improve people’s quality of life, TLF president Tsai Pei-yuen (蔡培元) said, adding that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) promised to pass such a law when she was running for president in 2015, but the Ministry of Labor has not yet put forward a draft.
Ensuring that workers have a decent place to live would improve the quality of their work and benefit the economy, Tsuei Ma Ma Foundation chief executive officer Lu Ping-yi (呂秉怡) said.
The government should curb soaring housing prices by increasing transparency in the housing market, and introducing tax reforms and other measures, he said.
The research was based on places advertised on the housing and property Web site 591.com.tw between April 24 and May 11, TLF said.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS