Taiwan's workplace is rife with the twisted culture of "long hours" and "low wages." According to a Towers Watson market survey, Korean university graduates earn an average starting salary of $2,228 USD per month, ranking first among 11 major countries and regions in Asia. The 2nd to 5th places are Singapore at $2,143, Japan at $1,957, Hong Kong at $1,677, and Taiwan at $1,058. Converted to TWD, that's about 31,000, but in reality, many young people in Taiwan don't even earn that much.
Beyond low salaries, many jobs that look glamorous are achieved by sacrificing your life—quite literally working yourself to death. Take my second job in "public relations," for example. The salary was about a graduate school starting wage, over 30,000. While work hours are flexible—starting at 9:30 a.m.—the end time is extremely unpredictable. Leaving at 8 p.m. is considered early; many colleagues stay until 10 or 11 p.m. If there's an event the next day, you might be there until 3 or 4 a.m. I've even heard of colleagues coming home at 6 a.m. to shower and then heading straight to the event venue to work.
Aside from PR, I know many friends in tech or pharmaceutical companies who, due to production lines and performance-based compensation, work over 12 hours daily and must stay on-call even during days off, making it impossible to truly relax. Then there are sales—my real estate agent friends often start work near midnight and then have to be at the office at 7 or 8 a.m. the next day to organize files, spending the entire day running around. Their hours are incredibly long. However, these industries usually have bonuses and higher salaries. The truly tragic ones are those with low pay and long hours.
Actually, many young people are incredibly talented but have nowhere to channel it. Fortunately, this is the age of the "slash career," which offers some flexibility. However, most people graduate from school, leave the safety net, and enter the workplace brimming with ideals and passion, wanting to contribute their abilities. Yet often, low wages and overtime cause them to question their life choices, wondering "Did I choose the wrong major?" Some endure two or three years with barely any raise, only to be harshly criticized by supervisors for small mistakes.
Those who can't tolerate it might frequently change jobs and companies, accumulating chaotic and messy work histories. One or two short stints might still be acceptable to interviewing companies, but in the long run, having five or six "short-lived" jobs will trigger the perception that "you lack stress resilience" or "frequent job changes are your problem, not the company's."
Of course, from an outsider's perspective, we might think the company's approach is "normal," but I believe "stress resilience" means facing enormous responsibility and pressure, finding ways to maintain physical and mental balance, and growing from the experience—that's the true meaning of resilience. If long hours, low pay, or a supervisor deliberately making things difficult means having to endure, only to get a 3,000 raise after two or three years, what's the point?
Unfortunately, many companies and greedy employers don't understand this logic. Instead, they impose the "unreasonableness" created by the broader environment onto young people, freely condemning them as "strawberry generation," without reflecting on whether those who survive this system still have genuine passion and ideals about their work. How do we enter the workplace full of hope, only to have those ideals buried on the battlefield by such torment, and then crawl our way out of our dreams?
