Employers are not allowed to dock a worker’s wages for not punching a time clock if the employee can prove they were working during the disputed time period, the Ministry of Labor said on Friday.
One of the most common causes of labor disputes in Taiwan concerns the use of time clock systems, Labor Conditions and Equal Employment Division deputy head Wang Chin-jung (王金蓉) said in a ministry statement.
Managers frequently believe that their legal responsibility to keep time clocks in a workplace gives them the right to dock the pay of workers who neglect to clock in or out, but the practice is illegal, she said.
Under the law, workers must be paid for the time they worked regardless of the records on a time clock, she said.
The rule applies to employee time logbooks, access cards or other technologies used to keep records of employee attendance and work hours for salary calculations, she said.
Companies are required to clearly explain salary policies and disciplinary rules to their employees, she said, adding that employers are not allowed to discipline workers by docking their pay.
Many labor disputes concern the treatment of sales clerks who had their pay docked for taking restroom breaks or receiving unfavorable reviews from a “secret shopper,” she said.
Restaurants that deduct pay from servers for not updating order tickets have also found themselves on the wrong side of arbitration, she said.
Employers are not allowed to make unilateral changes to the terms and conditions of employment, which must be negotiated with the worker, she said.
Should such a negotiation fail, employers must abide by the terms and conditions of the original employee contract, she said.
Employers must pay a worker who resigned from a position in full and no later than what would have been their payday, including those who did not work a full month since the last paycheck, she said.
It is the employer’s responsibility to convert a monthly salary to a daily rate to compensate an exiting employee for each day they worked, she said.
Employers are not allowed to use incomplete handover procedures as an excuse to delay payment or set a method of payment that differed from the original work contract, she said.
Nonprofits and other foundations are not allowed to compel workers to donate any part of their wage to the fund, she said.
Employers that contravene the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) face fines of NT$20,000 to NT$1 million (US$681 to US$34,071), and the ministry would publish the company’s name to warn workers, she said.
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