Newsletter
NIGHT WORK AND MISSED MEAL PAYMENTS ARE WAGES
"Wages" as referred to in the Labor Standards Act (LSA) are the basis for calculating severance payments, retirement payments, occupational injury compensation, and Labor Insurance and National Health Insurance contributions, and are also the basis for calculating the pension con-tributions to be made by an employer on an em-ployee’s behalf under the Labor Pension Act. Thus disputes often arise between labor and management over what payments should be in-cluded in the calculation of wages.
Article 10 of the LSA Enforcement Rules lists various types of payment that need not be treated as wages, and therefore employers often desig-nate various items of workers' wages as pay-ments under the listed categories. However, when disputes between labor and management over the content of wages lead to litigation in the courts, the courts usually determine the nature of the payments made by employers according to their true nature, and are not constrained by the use of designations from Article 10 of the LSA Enforcement Rules.
In view of the fact that such disputes have often centered on meal allowance and night shift al-lowance, which were previously listed under Article 10 of the Enforcement Rules as non-wages, in June 2005 the Council of Labor Affairs deleted these items from Article 10, in the hope of reducing the number of future dis-putes over the definition of wages.