Recession! Recession! Recession!
We’re now well into the recession of the century and analysts say that we most likely have not yet hit rock bottom. Lots of unheard of things are happening around the world and obviously tech heavy Taiwan is suffering as well.
I’m smart enough to get involved in the high tech industry right before the downfall. I really don’t mean this in a sarcastic manner, I’m actually really quite lucky. It’s next to impossible to find jobs in this industry in Taiwan at the moment. Employees are being made redundant left, right and center, companies are doing away with hand wipes in toilets and turning off the lights in the parking garage and even encouraging employees to buy their own products. There are many more horror stories and I’ve even heard of an alarming jump in suicide rates around where I live.
My company’s policy, as they say, is to try avoid redundancies at all costs. And their way of achieving this is to force employees to take time off. It started off as making us use up our holidays from last year and if you didn’t have any remaining, you would be allowed to start using this year’s. This was around November last year. From December the holidays that we are forced to take off became ones that we wouldn’t get paid for so it didn’t matter how many paid holidays you had, we were going to get a pay cut.
Pay cut it was and I’m taking an extra 5 days off a month, usually on Mondays. And that knocks a sixth off of my monthly salary. It’s an substantial quantity amounting to about my monthly rent for the place I’m staying at! Less orders doesn’t equal less work for us though as our bosses have started to demand much more detail in our work. They didn’t have time for the details in the past. So us engineers just end up having the same amount of work to do but 5 days a month less in which to do it in. It also isn’t quite a good time to be a newbie in the office as there isn’t much work for me to refine my skills!
Anyway, I thought that I’m entitled to a short commentary on this, and it seems now that the title of my blog is getting more relevant. I’m already lucky enough to experience the worst recession in my lifetime when my expenses are low and I’m in no need for cash. Still, those in school and are graduating later this year or next have it even better! There’ll be lots of job opportunities once they get out, assuming not too many companies actually bite the dust and disappear altogether!