Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Friday, February 10, 2012 0:20 am TWN, The China Post news staff

Sponsors
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!
▪	Save 75% for all hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and whole China. Lowest rates for Flights in China.
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.

Tax reform should not treat teachers like cheap labor

Introducing reform is one thing; making it work is another. The taxation reform imposed on the nation's teaching profession is an example.

Starting this year, the incomes of government-run elementary and junior high school teachers are taxable following years of disputes over taxation fairness. This group of teachers, which has been exempt from paying income taxes, will have to file tax returns for the first time ever in 2013 for the salaries they receive this year.

It is quite a remarkable reform to an old taxation system based on an argument that these teachers should not pay income taxes because they receive very little for their tough work load.

That may have been true three or four decades ago, but their income levels are now on par with many other salaried groups, plus they have an unbreakable “golden bowl” — their protection from layoffs.

Let's assume all agree that teachers must pay income taxes, as it is not the purpose of the present discussion to question the idea of taxation fairness. We want to question how this reform has been implemented.

To maintain their salary levels — or similar proportions between the amount of work and pay — the government chose to cut the teaching hours required of teachers on the regular roster.

The government did not raise their salaries obviously to avoid adding a burden on the national coffers.

And raising their pay would also have mandated a lot of changes to the salary scale for the entire body of civil servants — which would have been too controversial and too big a task to tackle.

But cutting the teaching hours — ranging from two to four depending on individual teachers' work loads — means that schools have to hire more teachers.

Now that is the problem. The education ministry is not allocating more budget for expanding schools' regular teaching staff. It is only asking local governments to source from their own coffers to fund the hiring of part-time teachers who are paid on an hourly basis.

1|2|Next Page>>