Tsai Gov’t Has No Magic Pill to Hike Wages, Except at Expense of National Coffers

 Tsai Gov’t Has No Magic Pill to Hike Wages, Except at Expense of National Coffers

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

January 22, 2018

 Translation of an Excerpt

Taiwan society has recently added a new phrase "the dreary generation," referring to the youth born in the 1990s. This generation’s common predicament is low wages, poverty, and no future. This "dreariness" makes society look like a leaking gas canister, ready to explode in an instance with a spark. Wages, holidays, work hours, etc., have virtually become a landmine between the generations that could not be touched, behind which is the fury of the young generation of low wages.

Since the beginning of her assuming office, Tsai Ing-wen has regarded the young generation as the main communal group of support; whether in her inaugural address or anniversary statement, she has repeatedly made appeals to the young people. However, after one and a half years, she is still saying, "If we do not start now, then we owe a debt to this generation"; at the time of assuming office, she said, "Please give us a little time," now she still says the government "needs a little time." She has not forgotten to use the low-profile: "If young people are still willing to listen to a few words from the government" to show her sincerity to the bottom of her heart, but the flowery rhetoric of the young literati has not been able to turn into substance, which makes people dreary.

NT$30,000 per month is precisely Tsai Ing-wen's “dream”--starting salary. But the Tsai government can only use the means of lowering interest rates and tax cuts to remedy people's dissatisfaction over wage stagnation, while the question of low wages remains without a solution. Rather than tax cuts and lowering interest rates at the expense of the national coffers, which does not help solve the youth predicament of low wages, the Tsai government should ponder conscientiously on a policy that would enable enterprises to make money and feed back to their employees substantively; this would be the right thing to do.

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