Workplace reviews and discussion: 台灣新光保全股份有限公司

1. On typhoon days (only when a suspension of work and classes has been officially announced), the duty pay is doubled (this probably doesn’t really count as a benefit; many companies offer this).

2. ...That’s it.

I was employed there in 2015, so everything mentioned here reflects the situation at that time.

1. During the interview, the supervisor kept telling you that the salary was better than the starting pay in other industries—NT$33,000 (in Taichung)—but when you actually break it down, it comes to.........an hourly wage just a few dollars higher than the minimum wage.

2. The duty shift was 12 hours, but you had to arrive at the company half an hour early to attend the pre-shift briefing, and you also had to fill out forms after work. In practice, excluding commuting, the working time was already 13 hours. Night-shift workers would also frequently receive calls about incidents just as they were due to finish in the morning, delaying their departure until the end of the shift. You could apply for overtime pay, but colleagues and supervisors would “very tactfully” say that it was troublesome and so on. After a while, you would get tired of it and stop applying.

3. Although the regular safety briefings/educational courses were paid, there was no additional compensatory time off. Day-shift workers attended classes in the evening, while night-shift workers attended in the morning. Those who still had to work that day simply lost half a day of their already pitifully short rest time.

4. When a customer’s contract expired without renewal or was terminated, the work of removing the security equipment was mostly assigned to night-shift employees after their shifts. The pay was NT$500 per location and took 1–4 hours (or longer), depending on how much security equipment the customer had installed. No matter how much had to be removed, the payment was always NT$500. Other companies assigned this work to outside contractors, but the supervisor at the time would only tell you, “The company had considered hiring contractors, but we took into account that some people wanted to earn a little extra money.” ........If the company was really being so considerate of its employees, then please pay “by the job and according to the amount of work.” If two people spend half a day removing equipment from a large factory or school and still cannot finish, it is still NT$500. And you expect me to believe this is “giving employees an opportunity to earn extra money”? Not to mention that in understaffed districts, almost everyone who went to remove equipment still had to work a shift that night. And understaffing happened frequently.

5. You can see traces of the military in many management practices and systems: pointless tasks, pointless forms, and ineffective briefings.

6. They are always complaining about employees not being familiar with customer locations and telling them not to rely too much on navigation systems. Supervisors would also say things like, “Back then, we didn’t have navigation to look at; we had to find maps ourselves and memorize the routes.” ................That was ten years ago. How many districts was one patrol area responsible for? Nowadays, a patrol area in Taichung is responsible for around 500 locations (and you also have to rotate through different patrol areas). For fuck’s sake, do you want me to memorize all of them and recite them for you? Of course you memorize the places you visit often. But if an alarm comes from somewhere you have never been, and you arrive too slowly, you get criticized for not knowing the customer’s location. Not to mention that new customers are constantly being added. With so many locations assigned to one patrol area, no wonder you can never finish responding to all the incidents on typhoon days. And this is Taichung; the locations in Taipei may be even more densely packed.

7. Oh, right—during the interview, they always tell you that the schedule is two days on, one day off, but they do not tell you that “two days on, one day off is only possible when there is enough manpower. When there is not enough manpower, schedules of four days on, one day off; five days on, one day off; or only five or four days off per month are all very common.” For a night-shift job involving driving around outside for 12 or more hours, do you really have the nerve to spend all day telling people to get enough rest before coming to work when the rest periods are like this?

There were probably other things, but it has been two years, and these are all I can remember.