Workplace reviews and discussion: 德欣貿業有限公司

No clocking in or out

【Advice for Job Seekers】

If you are still employed or preparing to start work, it is strongly recommended that you personally retain complete records for each day of your “attendance times and work locations,” “bank deposit details,” and “paper pay slips” to protect your statutory rights to claim unpaid overtime and shortfalls in labor pension contributions in the future.

Except for managerial positions, the basic salaries of entry-level and technical staff are essentially suppressed to the minimum wage (NT$29,500), while the remaining difference is made up under the name of a “meal allowance (such as NT$3,500)” to reach the agreed monthly salary (such as NT$33,000). On the surface, the company keeps the daily wage and base salary low as the calculation basis, but when deducting pay for employees’ leave, it instead divides the combined “full salary (NT$33,000)” by 240 hours to deduct wages, applying inconsistent standards.

On officially issued paper pay slips, the “overtime” field is always printed as “0.” The company transfers the base salary and overtime pay separately at different times. Even when an employee’s total actual monthly pay reaches NT$40,000–50,000 or more, labor insurance and labor pension contributions remain at the original fixed salary bracket (such as NT$33,300), rather than being legally adjusted to reflect the total amount of regular actual earnings.

Although there is a time clock inside the company, certain fieldwork and technical departments are instructed that they “do not need to clock in,” so the company fails to legally implement daily attendance records accurate to the minute. When rushing to complete projects or traveling to customers’ factories to test machinery, monthly overtime hours frequently exceed 60 to 100 hours; employees are often required to work continuously on Saturdays and Sundays (working for more than ten consecutive days without a day off, in violation of the one-rest-day-in-seven rule). There have even been cases of employees working from 8 a.m. straight through to 3 a.m. the next day (nearly 19 hours across two calendar days in a single shift), then continuing to work normal hours the following day after sleeping for only a few hours—an instance of severe overwork.

The technical department’s duties are extensive. In addition to drafting, checking drawings, and preparing wiring schedules in the office, employees often need to assist customers with panel inspections, machine testing, and troubleshooting in hot sheet-metal buildings or under the blazing sun. Travel to customers’ factories (often dozens of kilometers each way) sometimes also requires employees to drive themselves.

Department managers (at the manager level) bear heavy engineering workloads and on-site pressure, yet are treated as being under a “responsibility-based system” and receive no overtime pay. Senior management habitually applies psychological pressure through rhetoric such as “we have extensive industry connections, and if you resign, we’ll tell others in the industry not to hire you.” In addition, when carrying out certain local projects, the company’s internal awareness of copyright compliance for engineering and drafting software is also notably weak.