"I got up every morning at 5 a.m. At an hour when most people were still slumbering, I got to my job at the breakfast shop, made sandwiches and milk tea, delivered breakfast, and did other tasks. When I finished my shift and got back home, my roommate would still be snoring away! Over the lunch hour I worked at a restaurant, making noodles and doing accounts. In the evenings I tutored kids living up in the mountains."
"But I never felt sorry for myself, because lots of others worked part-time jobs, too. Being short of cash was a way of life for me. No matter how hard I struggled, I always felt like I had nothing. And I guessed maybe my father was in the same situation. The stress of day-to-day living made everything seem precarious and uncertain."
In "Hard at Work," an essay that brought him a Lin Rung San Literature Award, 24-year-old Wu Yi-wei offers the preceding description of the daily struggle he went through as a high-school and university student. Finding himself following a path much like that taken by his father, who ran a mom-and-pop store, he cast about for meaning in a hardscrabble existence.
But no matter how hard the young people of today may work (both physically and intellectually), the work world for them is a much tougher place than it was for an earlier generation.
Declining wagesA wage survey conducted last year by the Council of Labor Affairs indicated that new entrants into the labor force earned an adjusted average starting salary of NT$23,896 per month in 2009, which was actually NT$202 less than what it had been 10 years before in 1999.
In addition, 104 Corporation released a hiring survey this March indicating that despite Taiwan's improving economy, the highest starting salary that employers are willing to pay averages only NT$27,706, which is NT$6,000 less than new entrants into the labor force are hoping to earn.
An irony of higher education in Taiwan is that young people from lower-income families here tend to go to private schools, where tuition fees are higher. More and more of them are applying for student loans, which means they are saddled upon graduation with debts of NT$400-600,000, even though most will have to take low-paid, unstable employment. Right out of the starting gate, they find themselves on the treadmill of long-term poverty.
According to Shen Yun, executive director of Youth Labor Union 95 and a fourth-year student in the Department of Business Administration at National Taiwan University, a diploma no longer means anything in the workplace. Only a very few elites nail down an employment contract before graduation, and this sort of good luck comes only to those who study management or the hard sciences. Even worse, she complains, is that employers these days strongly prefer to hire people who have already done unpaid internships prior to graduation, yet despite this are unwilling to pay higher salaries, which means "they get you coming and going."
Intergenerational equityYouth Labor Union 95 has raised another criticism: If the monthly subsidy of NT$22,000 that the Ministry of Education once offered to employers to encourage them to hire new graduates constitutes a reasonable initial salary, then the statutory minimum wage should have been adjusted to something higher than NT$22,000 a month if the basic dignity of the worker were to have been upheld. But this number effectively became a benchmark for starting pay, and only made it all the harder for youth to escape the nightmare of impoverishment.
Burdened with high-cost education, students are forced to run themselves ragged working at multiple part-time jobs.
Youth Labor Union 95 receives about three or four complaints a day from people engaged in "atypical employment." Mostly below the age of 30, they work for a wide range of employers, including government agencies, cram schools, retailers, restaurants, and cleaning services. But their complaints are similar in nature-the employer may be failing, for instance, to enroll the person in Labor Insurance and National Health Insurance, not making retirement pension contributions, refusing to pay overtime wages, paying below the minimum hourly wage, or setting special contract provisions for making deductions from paychecks (e.g. penalty for quitting the job).
Young people have complained to Youth Labor Union 95 about their employers requiring them to buy their uniforms, or deducting the cost from their first month's pay. In other cases, employers have deducted the cost of uniforms as a security deposit and required employees to work for three months before they return the deposit, and otherwise will keep the money as a penalty for breach of contract. Is this reasonable treatment?
Youth Labor Union 95 points out that regulations issued by the Council of Labor Affairs require employers to foot the cost of uniforms, and it is not reasonable for them to force the cost onto employees. Moreover, deducting the cost from monthly pay is a violation of the Labor Standards Act, which requires that all wages be paid in full. An employee can file a grievance with the local labor bureau to demand fair treatment.
Youth Labor Union 95 has joined forces with other groups in calling on the government to show concern for the difficulties faced by youth. They are also encouraging people engaged in atypical employment to band together to safeguard their interests, because young people should not continue getting an unfair shake in the workplace.
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