Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) on Monday said that its pay increase plan, which was scheduled for January but still not implemented when it was postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak, would retroactively take effect on Aug. 1, after it hit its target revenue for two consecutive months.
The company had last year announced that a plan to raise employees’ salaries by an average of 3.42 percent would start in January, but no further action was taken.
In March, it suspended implementation of the plan due to the outbreak, but did not offer a date, saying that it would resume after “the pandemic eases and the high-speed rail starts generating stable revenue again.”
Photo: Cheng Wei-chi, Taipei Times
The company said “stable revenue” meant that it would have to record two consecutive months where total revenue was comparable to 70 percent of the revenue generated during the same period last year.
As the company has reached the benchmark it set for itself, THSRC chairman Chiang Yao-chung (江耀宗) announced at an incentive banquet on Monday night that the pay increase plan for all employees would retroactively take effect from Aug. 1.
Aside from the pay increase, the company also gave bonuses to employees who did government disease-prevention work between February and last month.
“We thank all our coworkers for working together to contain the spread of the pandemic and ensuring that trains operated on schedule at the most difficult time,” it said.
The THSRC Labor Union said it accepted the decision from the company’s management to resume the pay increase plan and appreciated that they had taken the union’s suggestions into consideration, although it would have preferred the plan to have retroactively taken effect on Jan. 1.
“We want to remind them that they were able to postpone the pay increase plan without any objection from employees because we understood that the decision was made in view of the COVID-19 outbreak, during which we have continued to do our jobs and follow the disease-prevention measures stipulated by the government,” the union said. “We hope the company will see how hard employees have worked and reward them accordingly.”
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