Workplace reviews and discussion: 勤穩貿易有限公司

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First of all, I did not actively apply to this company; they contacted me through a job bank. Therefore, I did not have high expectations to begin with. Perhaps this is what they mean by “no expectations, no disappointment.”

This company supplies food products, and it uses different company names on different job banks. Nan Hui Food Co., Ltd. and Xinxiangji Food Co., Ltd., for example, are actually the same company. Here is the important part: the company is located in a remote area of Shilin. It is so remote that you suddenly realize Taipei has farmland. The surroundings consist entirely of sheet-metal factories, fields, and other desolate areas with no sign of people. Occasionally, there are single-story houses that appear to be 40–50 years old. I say they are old because some are damaged or collapsed, allowing you to see that no one lives inside. That is the surrounding environment. Because it is far from major transportation routes, there is not even an MRT station nearby; most of the vehicles passing through are large freight tractor-trailers.

When you arrive, you see that the company’s main buildings are warehouses and factories made of sheet metal. The reason there are so many different company names, as I mentioned earlier, is that when I arrived, the address provided on the job bank led to a warehouse. I waited there for a while, but no one came. Eventually, someone stacking goods told me that the actual location was directly across the street. The sign across the street displayed one of the company names I mentioned earlier. The whole thing gave me a very disorganized, unstructured, and off-putting impression.

The office area was a very traditional first-floor sheet-metal building, with the atmosphere of an ironworking manufacturer’s or freight company’s office. They casually told me to wait in the conference room on the right, then left without even turning on the lights. Another person in charge eventually came in to turn them on, but they did not turn on the air conditioner, so the room was extremely stuffy and hot. The interviewer was a middle-aged woman around 45–50 years old, slightly overweight, wearing glasses with very large lenses. She had a somewhat smoke-and-alcohol-roughened voice. She told me to fill out a standard résumé form and then left.

After I spent about 10 minutes filling it out, I notified her that I was done, and she came in to begin the interview. After I briefly described my previous work experience, she used her slightly hoarse voice to run through the job duties once, as if reading from a script. After hearing it, I suspected that the company was stuck in the last century.

Although the position was listed as an accounting assistant, for the first three months after joining, I would have had to spend every morning packing and sorting goods in the sheet-metal warehouse I mentioned earlier. She claimed that the company had more than 6,000 products and that actual “physical labor” was necessary to become familiar with them. Only in the afternoon would I handle shipping data entry and administrative tasks. During those three months, the so-called combined administrative and accounting duties (in reality, half the job would have been warehouse management) would supposedly later be separated into different positions. They claimed that the company’s specialization was very detailed and that each person only needed to handle their own responsibilities. The contradiction is that, from the beginning, they wanted one person to do the work of three people. The position sounded exactly like a disposable chopstick prepared for use. When she said, “No one who joins has left; the position is to fill the vacancy,” didn’t that simply mean there had always been a vacancy?

As for salary and benefits, the offer was NT$24,000 plus NT$2,000 for perfect attendance (the basic monthly salary this year is NT$25,250—very clever), as well as a meal allowance. She also said there was supposedly a monthly performance bonus, but no bonuses for the three major holidays; everything else followed the Labor Standards Act. Then came another contradiction: she said that during busy periods, there would be one day of overtime around the beginning or end of each month, emphasizing that overtime pay would be provided. But if the company’s division of labor was supposedly so detailed and everyone only needed to handle their own duties, why would things become so busy that overtime was necessary?

Anyway, after hearing everything, I hurriedly wrapped things up and left. I also noticed that the interviewer was eager to end things quickly too, XD, because when she spoke quickly in her hoarse voice, her pronunciation became even funnier.