First time posting here.This offer is not teaching related. I have received a contract from a company (haven’t signed yet). However, everything is weird. They want me to sign 2 different contracts, one of them “Company-Employer” and the other one “the official that will be sent to the Ministry of Labor”. Both, of course, are TOTALLY different. In the first one, they have details - salary (32k, which is way lower than the official 47k for foreigners), penalties (which include 4 months of salary before the 1st year of work for ANY reason, even if I get fired, and 2 months salary as penalty between the 1st and 2nd year, since the contract is 2 years only). I find this absolutely ridiculous. Furthermore, they want me to sign the second contract, which will be sent as “official” where they say that I actually receive the 47k by law AND NO OTHER AGREEMENT between us, which is a total lie. I am willing to discuss this with the boss of the company, but have anyone had this situation before? Any advice will be highly appreciated.
Welcome to the forum here, @osopanda.
Are you in Taiwan now, or doing all this with the company from your home country?
While never having been in this situation, I would do the following.
- If you are still overseas, tell the company you will be talking to a local TECO “consulate” in your country to confirm what visa they recommend you to get given that you have 2 contracts.
- If you are in Taiwan, tell them you are going to Taiwan Tax Bureau on Chunghwa Road (near Ximenting) and you will ask the tax people, who have helped you out in the past, on how you will have to file taxes, based on 2 contracts.
See how they react to that. Do it all innocently of course, because you need to file the proper taxes in your home country as well.
Of course, there are labor laws they are probably breaking, and others will chime in on where to “go” to ask “innocent” questions about 2 contracts.
You can always also say you have a local Taiwanese friend who is a labor lawyer and wants to look at the 2 contracts just to read the fine-print. Do this all “innocently”.
But, they’re screwing you.
If you have other options, I would walk away from this one fast.
yeah, run, Forrest, run. This is unlikely to turn out well, and you’re unlikely to convince them to break what is presumably a decades-long pattern of unethical/illegal behaviour just for you. The under-the-table contract wouldn’t even be enforceable in court, I imagine, but that doesn’t mean they won’t use it to beat you with.
Apart from anything else, 32K is a joke.
I’m in Taiwan yes 
Thanks for the respond. I am also concern about the legality of having 2 contracts, I mean… They are technically hiding the entire information to the Ministry of Labor in the second contract they want to send for my paper work. Second, is it even legal to charge 4 months of salary as penalty (even if I get fired). I consider that so much money.
Thank you all for your thoughts. 
if you want to know about the legality, you may ask to Labour department of your local government or workforce development agency of MOL.
The tax office for one will splash you with the legal tax amount to be paid on 47k.
Hi Oso,
I notice this was moved to the TEIT forum, but you don’t specify in your post that it’s actually a teaching job. Would you mind clarifying what sort of job it is?
Btw I have a hunch that I know which company it is. Feel free to PM me.
I have a feeling the company is being strange too, but I’m no local employment lawyer. Agree with others you have to go about it in a way that saves everyone’s face. You always have the option to decline. You don’t have to accept it. There are other options.
Also, sometimes I find big companies are the worst when it comes to employment practices, work culture, etc.
What do you think? Of course it’s not legal. They are trying to screw you because they’ve done it in the past. This is their S.O.P. You have 3 options:
- go along with what they want you to do.
- Play the innocent/naive foreigner with a Taiwanese lawyer friend or “I should go to the tax office so they can explain to me how to file my taxes based on two different contracts right?”
- Tell them to go F%$K off.
I was in a somewhat similar situation years ago. Not as bad as your two contracts, but there was weird stuff in there and they didn’t want to give me health insurance. They said I didn’t need it. Anyhow, I said, “oh, okay…I’ll just go and get the health insurance myself”. Their response: “No! No! No! You can’t do that. A week later I had my health insurance. Play the game. I don’t know where you’re from, but Taiwanese companies screw people over. That’s the name of the game. You have to play the game or else they’ll just run you right over. Lying and cheating is rampant here and you cannot trust a word out of their mouths.
Assuming they’re sophisticated enough to have tried to put legal lipstick on this pig of a business practice, their intention in the event of a dispute is presumably to say the minimum salary requirement is purely administrative and thus cannot be enforced through a civil lawsuit (and presumably also that the “contract” for the government’s eyes isn’t actually a contract or at best is an administrative contract i.e. between them and the government). There actually is a constitutional interpretation by the CGJ that sort-of-but-not-exactly supports this loophole.
More importantly though, these people are asking you to lie to the government. I wouldn’t even give them the time of day. Let their crappy company scrape the bottom of the barrel and keep scraping until it collapses in a pile of its own crap. 
Thank you all for the warnings… I’ll take them all in consideration!
Or you could pull an Argarkov:
To sum it up: man receives credit card ad. He rewrites the contract attached to the ad, using same layout and fonts, so that the edited contract stipulates 0 credit interest and no obligation to pay any fee. Bank fails to check the contract and accepts. Two years later, bank terminates the credit card and sues the man for late fees and other charges. Man sues the bank back for not honouring the contract. In the end the former lawsuit fails, the latter is dropped after financial settlement is reached.
Thug life right there hahaha
X 1000%. There is no such thing as integrity in Taiwan.
It sounds strange, but this is pretty normal here. I’m glad everyone else here apparently hasn’t had to deal with this but I think every school I’ve worked for had done this. Often it works out better for the employee as you pay less tax. I’m not in advocating this practice, but it’s very common. You can likely negotiate before signing
Fairly normal. A lot of companies “officially” pay less than they actually pay so they pay less to the government somehow.
And you are right to. A company cannot withhold payment for hours you have actually worked. Some try to, but those terms are ridiculous. At the least, they should allow you to quit after giving sufficient notice. Signing that is little more than indentured servitude. If you want to go through with it, it’s completely unenforceable. If you are fired or need to quit, you can legally force them to pay your salary, but it’s a hassle. Better to just find a normal job.
Aside from the important questions of legality and ethics, which also shed light on how you could expect them to treat you going forward, the termination terms are ridiculous (they could build a business model simply based on firing teachers) and the wages are really low. I don’t think you mentioned how many hours, but even assuming just 16 a week, $32 k per month would work out to about $465 per hour.