A couple of months ago, said friend started a new job as an accountant at the branch office of an international company. While signing the employment contract etc., she also signed a one-page agreement about a company-sponsored mobile phone, where the company takes out a 24-month (or 30-month, not sure) NT$999 per month contract with Chunghwa, of which the company pays two-thirds and she pays one-third, that reverts 100% to her if she happens to leave the company (as well as a ~NT$3k deposit that isn’t mentioned in the one-page agreement – she found this out later when speaking to Chunghwa).
She shouldn’t have signed this contract and realized as such shortly after – she’s fairly fluent in Chinese, but I guess she’s lazy with reading sometimes and a bit reckless with signing stuff. The contract includes a handset but it seems a pretty shitty deal (the handset is only worth about NT$6k if bought directly, and she doesn’t want to pay a NT$3k deposit and NT$1k a month for ≥2 years for a phone package – she’s from an ASEAN country with more of a local salary than a foreigner’s salary and this is a decent chunk of money for her).
She hasn’t signed anything with Chunghwa, and she hasn’t opened the phone or used the SIM card since receiving them. She’s told the company that she doesn’t want the phone anymore but they’re insisting that she needs to take it.
She’s also just handed in her notice at this company after ca. 2 months there, owing to a combination of the work duties not being as described in the interview (it’s apparently more just scanning stuff and data entry than accounting, with the actual accounting work being done overseas at the head office) and insane unpaid overtime (typically staying until 11 p.m. or later most days of the week Monday–Friday). She did this after being told by her manager that the company wouldn’t continue employing her after the three-month trial period (she’s had a couple of arguments with the manager about the above points) and being advised to resign.
Anyway, the situation now is that she would like to find a way out of this phone contract. Any ideas?
A couple of thoughts:
Is this kind of agreement about transferring the phone number legal? The company obviously has some kind of claim against her because she initially signed the agreement saying she agrees to take over the phone contract if she leaves the company. As noted above, she hasn’t signed anything with Chunghwa, which I presume is a prerequisite for her actually taking over the monthly contract. It seems odd to me that one can sign a contract vaguely agreeing to accept the terms of a future, unseen contract (as noted, the one-page agreement is quite minimal and doesn’t contain full details, like the fact that she would need to pay Chunghwa a deposit). What do the legal experts think? @yyy?
She’s also considering going to the labor bureau about the excessive unpaid overtime (she has evidence of this). This would probably slightly exceed the value of the phone contract, not to mention that the hours she worked were illegal under the Labor Standards Act, for which I believe the company can be fined quite a lot.
She does have legitimate reasons for wanting to leave the company (excessive/illegal unpaid overtime and job duties not as described).
She’s also considering leaving Taiwan, at least temporarily, in the near future for work. Does this affect the ability to cancel a Chunghwa contract in general, if moving to an area where Chunghwa can’t provide service?
This is just me spitballing but you said that they said they won’t keep her on after the 3 month trial. I would think that would be on them to deal with their overpriced phone service then since it isn’t her resigning. And just letting them know that if they continue to harass her over the phone service, she will let the labour board know about all the unpaid hours. Usually that gets them to back off before government gets involved and takes a deeper look at their business. I’d go that way first.
She might even quality for that legal aid foundation service. She can get a lawyers opinion. Obviously not a lawyer but I suspect forcing employees to take a company phone and pay for it when they didn’t want it in the first place wouldn’t be looked at kindly by the labour board.
Damn, mixing labor law and consumer law? That’s a headache.
Initial thoughts:
no contract with Chunghwa is a major plus
Civil Code Art. 247-1 may be enough to void the phone stuff on her end
future problems with Chunghwa? ==> if so just pick another carrier
She should talk to the labor department and probably should pursue mediation. If she can prove they’ve been failing her pay her for overtime, they’ll probably want to settle. A lawyer’s opinion is also a good idea.
Seems best just to leave at the normal time (refuse overtime) and let them release her after three months. Then everything should be void. She has no direct contract with Chungwha, the company will just give it to the next sucker.
Just as a brief (edit: failed) update to this situation:
It seems you were right about this, so thanks for the suggestion. Or, at least, the Legal Aid Foundation lawyer we spoke to today also thought this was a reasonable argument after seeing the contract and hearing about the dispute. 90% of the discussion was in Chinese so I wasn’t really following, but the lawyer’s assessment was that the original agreement about taking over the phone contract likely wouldn’t be enforceable if it goes to court.
She finished working there yesterday, and for the previous few days the company had been repeatedly pressuring her to sign another contract saying she agrees to pay the Chunghwa cancellation fee. She refused to do this (multiple times), despite the company lawyer and HR harassing her over it and recording a phone call with her as proof she’d been informed of the cancellation fee she needs to pay and that she would be sued to recover the fee if she doesn’t pay it voluntarily.
She also refused to take the still-unopened phone with her and left it in the office, which ultimately led to the company lawyer and two HR employees chasing her down ten flights of stairs and out of the building trying to insist she takes the phone because it’s hers now, with the lawyer recording a video the whole time. She had to lose them by crossing the road on a red light then going into the MRT. This is all over a cancellation fee of ca. NT$6,750 and a phone worth about NT$6,000 new, so this behavior by a company is a bit bizarre!
I’m assuming that the company will next try to deduct this from her final paycheck (which I understand isn’t okay either). In any case, we’ve calculated her unpaid overtime for the two months she worked there as being on the order of NT$28k*, including multiple cases where her daily and weekly working hours exceeded the legal maxima (up to 13.5 hours in a day and up to 63 hours in a week, respectively, excluding lunch breaks).
I understand that the fines for these LSA violations are considerably more than the disputed amount, so the next step will be filing a complaint with the labor bureau, with a view toward going through mediation for the unpaid overtime and getting them to drop the phone issue.
*Edit: After reading this post, it seems I calculated this wrong because I was using logical math (ca. 22 working days per month) rather than shitty Taiwanese employer math (30 working days per month) - should be around NT$21k.
I’m just genuinely surprised that the company staff, let alone a lawyer, would think that three people chasing a departing employee down the street is an appropriate response to this situation (rather than accepting her answer that she won’t sign anything until she’s gotten legal advice then suing her later).
It sounds more like an act of desperation in this case. They probably know that a settlement wouldn’t end well for them - so they’ll at least try to influence it in their favor („Oh, but she also has the phone now, so it’s not like she hasn’t benefited from the contract!“).
Yeah, that’s exactly why I recommended she leave the phone in the company and take a picture/video as evidence… (The reason for the chase down the stairs was that they first tried to throw it in the elevator with her!)
