Taiwan Railway Union calls off Lunar New Year holiday strike plan

The Taiwan Railway Union has called off a strike action during the Lunar New Year holiday.

They planned the strike over alleged unfair pay to avoid damaging “people’s trust in domestic transportation,” it said Monday.

The union, which has around 1,000 members, resolved on Dec. 21 to collect signatures from its members for a petition to take four days of legal leave from Feb. 9 to Feb. 12 due to complaints of unfair pay.

The week-long Lunar New Year holiday begins on Feb. 8.

According to the Labor Standards Act, employees are entitled to take days off with pay during the holiday, the longest of the national holidays celebrated in Taiwan.

Most people use the time to travel back to their hometown for family gatherings or to travel on vacation.

The petition demanded that the Taiwan Railway Corp. — the corporatized version of the Taiwan Railways Administration launched on Jan. 1 — come up with a comprehensive employee retention program, including providing a higher on-call allowance for train conductors.

In a statement released Monday, the union said the petition had been signed by more than 50 percent of train conductors and employees responsible for station and train operations, meeting the threshold needed to mandate a strike.

The recent labor-management dispute involving EVA Airways pilots over wages, however, has caused public distrust of “transportation stability,” the union said.

That left it worried that people’s trust in the transportation system could be jeopardized if the railway union’s members took leave during the holiday.

Also, the union reached a consensus with the railway company on raising on-call allowances for train conductors from NT$88 (US$2.82) per hour to the hourly minimum wage of NT$183 during negotiations earlier this month, it said.

While the company had promised multiple times that it would increase the allowances, the union saw the concession by the company as a sign of labor-management consensus on the issue of unfair pay, it said.

The union indicated last month that the railway company’s employee retention program had created a huge allowance gap between train drivers and conductors.

For instance, drivers were offered an on-call allowance of about NT$200-NT$400 per hour based on their hourly wage, while conductors receive only NT$88 per hour.

Also, drivers received a monthly retention allowance of NT$3,000 and another NT$3,000 in hazard pay, while conductors received a retention allowance of only NT$2,000 and hazard pay of NT$40 per hour.

Under such circumstances, the union said Monday that the railway company’s focus should not be solely on drivers’ requests while ignoring those of general employees, and it asked the company and its supervisor, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, to keep their promises.

The railway company has around 16,000 employees, including 1,250 drivers.

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