The number of employees on unpaid leave is going down. That’s the word from the Ministry of Labor on Wednesday.
As of March 15, there were 27 companies with 642 employees on unpaid leave. That’s down from the 45 companies and over 1000 employees just two weeks prior.
Labor Minister Chen Hsiung-wen said the figures mean that the trend of putting workers on unpaid leave is slowing down after it began to rise last October. However, the increase of the past few months has not reached the record high recorded in 2009 when over 900 companies had nearly 24,000 employees on unpaid leave.