One of the most obnoxious new legislators is the KMT’s Hsu Chiao-hsin (Taipei City, Xinyi and Songshan Districts).
She has made a big deal about her humble origins as an ordinary member of the Taipei middle class. Her parents ran a breakfast shop for 16 years. Recently though she has been caught out wearing expensive brands and luxury accessories. Questions about her financial reports under Taiwan Sunshine Law have been raised.
She now says that here family is well off because the breakfast shop her family operated earned NT$20,000 per day. Not clear if that was net or gross.
In any event, no wonder her father left his middle managament job at UMC to run a humble breakfast shop. In Taiwan, business owners are the winners and employees are losers.
If you’re talking about traditional breakfast shops that make a lot of stuff from scratch, including boiling soybeans for soy milk in the summer heat, they earn every cent.
The owner is the one who has to open at 5am every morning, and cover when the staff don’t show.
Don’t really see what the problem is, TBH. Is a breakfast shop lao ban (or a middle manager at UMC) not an ordinary, “middle class” guy? Is it somehow wrong to earn money from hard work now? The risks and effort involved in running a breakfast shop are significant and IMO these people provide a public good and are doing honest work. It’s certainly a lot more honourable than being a rentier, for example, as many politicians are.
I can only speak for the few near me, Taipei.I see them rolling out dough, shifting huge bowls of soaked soy beans to the grinder then into a boiling vat after grinding, and so on. Even the turnip cakes, saw the turnips delivered in a big bag at the door. I’ll walk past in the middle of the night and owner is there dozing on a seat near the counter.
Sure, but if you’re raking in 20k/day, surely you can afford to pay your employees more than 180/hr so they feel any amount of loyalty towards you, rather than working with the understanding that “replaceable” applies equally to employer and employee? And also, if they’re making that much, they’re paying taxes, yeah? So where are those tax records? Oh, they “don’t make enough to pay taxes?” They must not be making 20k/day then!
In any country business owners take a risk to invest money to start a business.
How are the employees the losers? They have employment. If they don’t like being employed, do what I did and start your own business.
Thumbs up to this increasingly elusive sort of shop. Why go through all that hard work and trouble to do things right when the majority of shops nowadays, at least in the capital, serve up reheated industrial fare and still survive?
