My school has a provision in my contract that states if I take either a Monday or a Friday off as personal leave, then I lose pay for the Saturday and Sunday too even though I don’t usually work weekends. I have to come in for the odd half day for graduation, school concert, etc but normally weekends are not work days.
Does anyone know if this is legal? I’m paid monthly by the school if that has any bearing.
I ask because I’ll be applying for leave to go on honeymoon soon and wanted to know where I stand before I get into any arguments about it. Also the law states that you’re entitled to 8 days for your honeymoon, but the contract states it is limited to 5 days. Is that also legal?
It would be a bit annoying to take Monday to Friday off and then lose 4 days pay because of the two weekends that I’m not working on anyway!
Most places that pay monthly here work out the salary on a per-day basis anyway, so maybe you can try finding this out before you talk about the issue at hand. As for the contract, I’m sorry but I have no idea! I’m sure someone else does.
If the Labor Standards Act applies to your employment (covered in another thread on here) then you cannot contract out of the minimum protections guaranteed by a LSA. You can agree to more favorable terms but not less. So if the LSA applies then anything less than the statutory eight days for wedding leave would not be enforceable. I suspect that you will also find that if the LSA applies that losing three days pay for taking one day off would not be enforceable either.
Yes, contact the CLA. I had good experiences with them a few years ago, but others have not (read housecat’s account). They can be hit and miss at enforcing these laws, apparently.
Sorry for the late reply to this thread. I called the CLA and got pushed around from place to place until I finally got to speak to the Banqiao CLA. They seem to think as the school is private, they can put anything into a contact that they like. I find this very hard to believe. It was a particularly painful conversation full of misunderstandings and so it could be that they just didn’t get what I was talking about. They suggested I go to the office to discuss it and when I get a chance, I will.
I use to work for a school that had a strange way of deducting money. They would divide the amount of money earned in one month by the number of days in a month. Not working days, but actual days. So if my salary was 60k a month and I took a day off in a month with 30 days, I would lose 2000, but only 1935 in months with 31 days. But when I took 2 weeks off to go home, I would be deducted 16 days instead of the 10 actual working days.
With private employers, contracts are more or less negotiations. You should have negotiated before starting the job. You can still try to talk to them if that helps but legal or illegal is not an issue here.
Yeah, we have the same thing. For contracts, is not that Taiwanese law always supersedes any clause in a contract? Otherwise couldn’t employers get away with paying far less than the minimum wage, for example, if the contract allowed it?
If no one else has noticed, the reason the boss deducts pay for Saturday and Sunday is so you don’t make “3 day weekends” for yourself.
Hell, if I was going to lose an extra 2 of days pay for days I don’t usually work on just for taking 1 day off, may as well take 2 days off.
Make that a real long weekend, and as an extra bonus, you save 50% for taking that 2nd day off.
As for the CLA, I wonder if pointing out their logic of a “private contract” would basically mean that anyone that signs a employment
contract is not covered by the labour laws. If that’s true, then what’s the point of having labour laws if you can sign your rights away?
I think the CLA does this to just get rid of these cases brought up by foreigners. Since most of the foreigners who would bring up a
case of illegal provisions in their employment contract to the CLA can’t read or speak Chinese, then can’t assert their rights effectively.
Which is great for those who work at the CLA, means less work for them.
Can anyone give examples when the CLA was useful in a case like this? Somehow I doubt anyone can…
[quote=“johnledoe”]If no one else has noticed, the reason the boss deducts pay for Saturday and Sunday is so you don’t make “3 day weekends” for yourself.
Hell, if I was going to lose an extra 2 of days pay for days I don’t usually work on just for taking 1 day off, may as well take 2 days off.
Make that a real long weekend, and as an extra bonus, you save 50% for taking that 2nd day off.
As for the CLA, I wonder if pointing out their logic of a “private contract” would basically mean that anyone that signs a employment
contract is not covered by the labour laws. If that’s true, then what’s the point of having labour laws if you can sign your rights away?
I think the CLA does this to just get rid of these cases brought up by foreigners. Since most of the foreigners who would bring up a
case of illegal provisions in their employment contract to the CLA can’t read or speak Chinese, then can’t assert their rights effectively.
Which is great for those who work at the CLA, means less work for them.
Can anyone give examples when the CLA was useful in a case like this? Somehow I doubt anyone can…[/quote]
Look up the threads where I discuss what happened with me vs Hess in the first half of 2008, and how I got the CLA involved.