Death of a Civil Servant
The suicide of an overworked civil servant at the Ministry of Labor has outraged Taiwan. Was workplace bullying to blame?
His mother waited for him to come home to eat dinner after work. But one day, the 39-year-old civil servant surnamed Wu never made it..
The close-circuit video footage showed that he got to work as early as 5a.m. but often didn’t leave his office until as late as 8p.m. Curiously, his time card didn’t show any overtime, let alone the 12-15 hour days. Wu took his own life Executive Yuan's Xinzhuang Joint Office Tower while working on a weekend. He was discovered on the 4th of November.
“There is a lot of pressure at work. But all my colleagues are great. I’d like to thank my co-workers at the Northern Regional Office. I’d also like to thank my family,” said one of the suicide notes he left behind.
In the aftermath, Wu’s boss Branch Chief Hsieh Yi-jung screeched at the remaining staff: “I’m told that two legislators know about [Wu]. I am enraged. He was so grateful of all everyone at the Northern Regional Office. So I will not allow the idle gossip to continue, no talk of workplace bullying,” said Hsieh her voice breaking, “whether it’s internal discussion or not. I will absolutely not allow it! Do you all get it?”
As if well-trained, the staff answered in unison: “We get it!”
The unhinged call and response was repeated two more times, with Hsieh’s voice rising threateningly in volume each time. Hsieh also said that a “medium” working in the Taipei-area hospital morgue told her that Wu “left in harmonious peace” and that the only thing the family wants is for the incident to be completely low-profile. (In fact, Wu’s mother later told the media she wants the truth and justice for her son.)
Speaking on conditions of anonymity, the staff member that leaked the voice recording to the media said they weren’t trying to catch Hsieh out in the wake of Wu’s suicide, but that she was an erratic, bullying boss and they recorded her routinely to protect themselves.
Good intentions?
“There’s a limit to how much overtime you’re supposed to take,” said another anonymous source to the United Daily News, “[Wu] didn’t want to cause any problems so he clocked in at 7:30p.m. and out at 5:30p.m. even though in reality he was working 12-15 hour days. Ironic isn’t it? That’s the sort of thing you’d expect at private companies, not the Ministry of Labor.”
Other recordings showed Hsieh harshly berating her staff for not answering messages on the messenger app Line on weekends and late nights, amongst other things. Staff dreaded being called into her office, artfully decorated with Staghorn ferns, because it almost always led to a humiliating dressing-down.
“It’s true that Hsieh lost control of her emotions, screamed at and humiliated her colleagues. Some had to seek therapy [over her workplace bullying],” said a Ministry of Labor report on the incident, “but her intentions were good. That is, she meant to promote effectiveness and raise the productivity of staff.”
The report found that there was no evidence that Hsieh directly bullied Wu, and therefore it his death cannot be blamed on her. However, in the less than two years Wu has been at her job, 81 staff members out of 105 either quit or asked for a demotion in order not to work for her directly.
Continued outrage
The Ministry of Labor report, which was seen as avoiding blame for Hsieh, led to renewed outrage for the incident. Rumors started surfacing that Hsieh, who was “parachuted” into her role despite a weak resume had strong political connections. Even after the Minister of Labor stepped down, Hsieh retorted to the press that she had no intentions of quitting her position as this week. (Hsieh was finally dismissed by the MOL on Wednesday after intense scrutiny.)
The media firestorm shows no signs of abating. A number of KMT, TPP and even ruling DPP legislators have questioned the MOL on how such a case could have occurred in the very institution meant to protect the right of workers in Taiwan. TPP legislator Huang Guo-Chang renewed his call for the Whistleblower’s Protection bill, which he said would encourage the victims to come forward earlier.
“Until we protect them, the only whistleblowers in Taiwan would be martyrs,” said Huang. While information did leak in the wake of Wu’s suicide, they were anonymous posts online or leaks to the media.
Huang also criticized the MOL report as “the right hand criticizing the left hand” and called for legislative reform to allow for the legislature to investigate cases like Wu’s.
“Bureaucrats protecting Bureaucrats”
“I don’t want bureaucrats protecting bureaucrats,” cried Wu’s mother to the press, asking for justice for her son.
DPP spokeswoman Dai Wei-Shan denied that the ruling DPP has been trying to sweep the case under the carpet.
“The president issued his apologies on this subject on Friday,” said Dai, “the executive team is acting quickly and transparently. There is zero tolerance for workplace bullying.”
It’s difficult to tell the state of mind of anyone who takes their own lives, but one thing is sure: Branch Chief Hsieh was a monster in the office and it is almost inexplicable that she had been allowed to abuse her staff for so long. Whether or not she directly bullied Wu, she was the Branch Chief of his office where he was undeniably swamped by work, given no support and felt pressured to alter his time card so that he was not compensated fairly for his labor.
Taking a wider societal lens: the civil servants’ exam is difficult to pass and Wu would have had to be in the top 10 percent or so to “test in.” How is it possible that a relatively elite 39-year-old engineer (Wu was responsible for creating a “smart employment platform”) chose to work for the government at all, let alone felt like he had no choice but to put up with the abuse?
Deaths by suicide have a special role in Chinese/Taiwanese culture. It is often seen as the last avenue of protest open to the powerless. And it is taken seriously by society. There is something deeply unwell with the Taiwanese workplace. It’s something everybody already knew, but it might have taken the death of a civil servant for Taiwan to take reckoning with it seriously.
All employess should join or form a labor union. The bosses have their associations that advance their trade, so too should their employees.. With a collective voice gives employess the best lererage with employment rights/justice.
"[Wu] didn’t want to cause any problems so he clocked in at 7:30p.m. and out at 5:30p.m." <- I think you made a typo, and it should be "7:30a.m."
This also reminds me of the Hakka language TV drama Karoshi (勞動之王), in which the actor Tender Huang plays a character who is a mistreated worker at the Ministry of Labor.