新越五金有限公司

Actually, I don’t understand the pros and cons; I’m just sharing.

Salary and benefits: The starting daily wage is NT$960. The stated working hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (To protect the company’s interests, I won’t disclose the actual hours), with a one-hour lunch break. (This began in the latter half of February 2018.) Saturdays are not necessarily working days; when you do work, overtime pay is calculated. Sundays are uniformly days off and are paid at half the daily wage. Non-Sunday public holidays are unpaid. (The rumored system where the base monthly salary is below NT$15,000 during the Lunar New Year month is probably similar to this, but I haven’t experienced the New Year period yet. In the month of the four-day Qingming holiday, my base salary including perfect-attendance pay was approximately NT$20,000 based on my experience at this company.) Perfect-attendance pay is NT$1,000. Although we clock in and out at work, the pay envelope does not include attendance records. The regular attendance card and overtime attendance card are separate. On the pay envelope, regular working hours are written directly on it, while overtime is recorded on a removable note stuck to the back of the pay envelope. It’s very simple. In theory, an ordinary employee who wanted to falsify a pay envelope could do so. To avoid possibly being charged with document forgery, I will not pursue this through legal channels. (After all, I have no way to prove whether the pay envelope I provide was issued by the company or made by me. I believe this company must have a way to prove that the salary and benefits it provides are completely legal.)

Work content: Avoiding confidential information makes this somewhat difficult to discuss, but I’ll try. Basically, the work is divided into indoor and outdoor areas. The general process is: take things to the indoor area for processing, then take them to the outdoor area for sorting, and hand them over to the driver for delivery. Basically, there aren’t many problems; it’s physical labor.

Relationships with coworkers: Regrettably, when assigning work, some senior workers habitually add insulting or aggressive words and frequently discriminate against employees. Here are two contrasting examples. First: When a problem is discovered halfway through a task, after the boss corrects the way the work is done, he may add words with a discriminatory implication. His attitude can still be categorized as joking; as long as the work method is corrected, that’s all that matters. Second: When a senior worker brings out freshly completed work to explain the task, he may end with aggressive words, discriminating against the employee before they have even touched anything by saying that the employee is unlikely to handle the task. His attitude can only be categorized as genuinely believing this deep down. Both examples have occurred at this company.

Lunch-break options: A small number of people use the air conditioning in the employee break room, a small number temporarily leave the company, and most people gamble at the company entrance. The gambling involves dice. Several people take out money and place it on the ground, then take turns rolling the dice. The wins and losses each time probably aren’t very large? That isn’t important, because people in senior positions also participate, so there is a chance of winning a raise, as well as the risk that the company will gradually reclaim employees’ wages. That is why most people participate in the gambling. There’s no need to worry about reporting it either; there are also people who don’t gamble and simply enjoy the natural breeze at the company entrance (while checking whether a police car turns in). I’m not planning to report it, and it seems I shouldn’t encourage it either. Whatever— that’s all.

The cost of being late: I haven’t been late yet, but according to coworkers who have been late, if you’re late at all, you lose your perfect-attendance pay. Being one minute late also means a NT$1,000 deduction; being later or staying late longer may result in a larger deduction.

The cost of taking leave: First, you receive no pay for that day (NT$960 in my case). Second, you lose the perfect-attendance pay (NT$1,000). Third, each day of leave results in one Sunday’s half-day pay being deducted (NT$480 in my case). Fourth, working Saturdays comes with no premium (it is not counted as overtime); in my case, during the month in which I took one day of leave, every Saturday was paid at the regular daily wage of NT$960. Overall, taking one day of leave means receiving at least NT$2,440 less (not including the loss of the Saturday premium). It’s quite reasonable to say that taking one day off is equivalent to losing three days’ wages. By the way, some people might think I took leave at the last minute, so let me clarify: I told the boss about my leave two weeks before the date. (This section analyzes the contents of the June pay envelope received on July 10, 2018.)

I can’t think of any other benefits for now. I’ll edit this if I think of any.

I’m still here, so there are zero drawbacks.