Over 70% of employees in Taiwan satisfied with their jobs: Survey

Taipei, Jan. 29 (CNA) Nearly three-quarters of employees in Taiwan are satisfied with their current jobs, according to the results of the Ministry of Labor's (MOL) 2023 survey on workers' lives and employment released Monday.

Some 74.6 percent of the 4,095 polled respondents said they felt satisfied with their current jobs, up 1.20 percentage points from a similar survey conducted a year earlier.

According to the MOL, the annual survey was conducted from June 2022 to May 2023 and targeted only Taiwanese employees signed up for the national labor insurance scheme.

The MOL did not provide a margin of error or a confidence level for the survey.

The survey asked how the respondents felt about 11 factors that could affect job satisfaction.

The factor drawing the top satisfaction level was gender equality in their working environment, with 97.3 percent of respondents expressing satisfaction with that aspect of their workplaces.

That was following by 96.1 percent being comfortable with the friendliness of their colleagues and 94.0 percent voicing general satisfaction with their workplaces.

The lowest rated factor was pay, with only 76.8 percent of respondents saying they were happy with their pay levels.

Other factors that scored at the lower end of the spectrum were workloads and the way supervisors evaluated them.

Some 77.4 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the amount of work they had to do, and 78.3 percent agreed with their bosses' evaluation methods, the survey found.

During the year when the survey was conducted, 41.2 percent of respondents said they had worked overtime, down 0.8 percentage points from the 2022 survey, with an average of 13.4 overtime work hours a month.

Some 63.1 percent of workers in the electricity and utility sector said they had worked overtime, the highest among the major sectors worked by respondents, recording an average of 15.1 overtime working hours a month, the MOL said.

More than 50 percent of respondents in the public administration, national defense, logistics/warehousing, health care, social services, and public insurance sectors also said they worked overtime during the year, the MOL said.

According to the survey, about 85 percent of employees received overtime pay or got hours off as compensation for their overtime hours.

Almost 20 percent of respondents from the real estate sector, however, said they were never compensated for working overtime, as was the case for more than 10 percent of respondents in the publishing and information communications, retail/wholesale, technology services and manufacturing sectors, the MOL said.

Some 17 percent of respondents said they were assigned work by their superiors through communication apps after having left their workplaces for the day, and nearly a third of them had to return to their workplaces to complete the tasks assigned, the survey found.

While some netizens initiated a campaign to make Taiwan the first country in East Asia to allow a four-day work week, the results of the survey suggested the idea has not yet been embraced by many Taiwanese workers.

Asked about different schedules to work the same amount of hours, 45.4 percent of respondents said they preferred to work five days a week with a flexible work schedule, and 44.7 percent said they preferred to work five days a week with a fixed work schedule.