Under the Guidelines for Workers’ Attendance Management and Wages (天然災害發生事業單位勞工出勤管理及工資給付要點), workers can choose not to work on official typhoon days and employers are banned from treating it as absence without leave, requiring employees to do compensatory work, deducting their bonuses or carrying out any other form of punishment, the ministry said.
Employers are also advised to not dock employees’ pay if the latter choose not to work on a typhoon day and to offer additional pay when they decide to work, it added.
Granted, it’s not “law”, but rather an advisory or guideline.
Unfortunately that’s not the case. Most manufacturing operates on this basis, including large multinationals in Taiwan. Not all of course but a significant percentage.
From an employer perspective, your means of generating revenue have been removed due to a Typhoon, if you can reduce your losses by not having to pay employees for work they are not doing they why would you pay them?
Yesterday, I was told to stay home and work from home so it didn’t matter either way for me but I do enjoy the odd “I went for a walk out my door and it looks fine so everybody else should go to work/school” or “think of the businesses losing a few bucks for no other reason other than potentially saving a few lives”.
I don’t think anyone is saying things shouldn’t be closed when it’s necessary, but I think is was clear to most that this wasn’t going to impact Taipei. But this is par for the course here. Next time when it is serious there will be a bunch of pressure not to close.
Anyway, just rode across town. Light rain and wind, no trees down, and the sun was out when we arrived.
From an employee perspective the employee was ready, willing and expected by their employer to be at work. So I would think they should still be compensated. Oh well, doesn’t impact me
Just a reminder: no one was going to take risks on the 10th anniversary of Morakot. Especially when relevant commemoration ceremonies had to be postponed because of the typhoon.
Why do you think so? I haven’t had a lot of experience, but what I’ve seen is that labor unions are very powerful, employees can make frivolous claims against their employers and get payouts, the labor laws make it very difficult for a business to change course, and the government is very active in pursuing the labor laws.
To the mods, if you decide to move this for being off-topic, could you please move it to one that isn’t temporary?
The fact that they called the day off for Yilan is baffling. Basically everyone went to work anyway. Dry roads and very little wind since the morning, wtf.
True story.
I once got post in Xindian addressed to some other foreign dude .
But they decided to mail it to me cos I was the handy 'local foreigner ’ (there’s actually even more to it involving but that’s the gist of the story )…
)…