The dance productions are beautiful, and the venue’s historical materials are interesting and abundant. If you stay for a while, you will build up quite a few professional connections.

The staff turnover rate is very high, and there is almost no work handover procedure, so newcomers need to spend a lot of time integrating into the work, only to then be scolded for not knowing how to do things.

You need your supervisor’s permission to leave work. You often have to work overtime and can only leave after finishing your tasks, sometimes as late as eleven or twelve at night—effectively an all-inclusive responsibility system. There is no overtime pay or compensatory leave. Even after working more than seven consecutive days, you are not given a day off. It is impossible to take eight days off in a month because the boss will call you in to work, seriously violating the Labor Standards Act.

Other than paying salaries on time, there is nothing commendable about the company in terms of labor practices. Supervisors often interrupt your work and tell you to do something else, then turn around and scold you for taking so long and not finishing the task. The morning work meetings are essentially occasions for supervisors to subject you to psychological bullying. They use all kinds of rhetoric to berate you, often simply taking out their frustrations on employees. For example: “You haven’t even prepared to take over the baton—how dare we entrust Taiwan’s future to you? (Seriously?)” or “You can’t do anything properly yet still make the supervisor step in to help. You’re simply an unsuitable administrative worker.” (In reality, the task was often completed according to the supervisor’s instructions, but when reviewing it a second time, the supervisor would overturn their own instructions and demand that it be redone.)

Moreover, supervisors set employees against one another. They separately tell different people that another employee will be demoted to part-time status or fired, leaving no sense of trust within the work team. Supervisors even go beyond the Labor Standards Act: whenever they lose their temper, they arbitrarily fire employees without providing severance pay. They will tell you to resign yourself, and then make remarks in front of the other employees such as: “If you don’t want this job, there are plenty of people waiting to take it.” It is simply unreasonable.

In short, this is a company that treats employees as disposable chopsticks. They talk about human rights, but employees have no human rights there, and the Labor Standards Act is disregarded. It is especially hypocritical for them to be a company involved in social movements while saying one thing and doing another. After working there, you will become utterly disappointed in nonprofit organizations and social movement activists.