 While much of the world spent the better part of the past year in some form of lockdown, Taiwan's 23 million residents lived almost virus-free. They went to baseball games and navigated crowded night markets. Schools didn't close. Neither did offices. Almost everywhere else, companies had to put their contingency plans to the test. In many cases, that turned out to mean not only technical support for newly remote workers but more flexible attitudes about business hours and greater awareness of the personal and family needs that compete for workers' time and energy. Taiwan, on the other hand, remained stuck in 2019, with workplace expectations that already lagged other relatively high-tech, progressive places. "Taiwanese businesses tend to be hierarchical, and as such what the boss says and does is very important," said Christine Chen, a partner at Taipei-based law firm Winkler Partners specializing in employment matters. "Optics in an office are also very important — people need to be seen doing things." Now that the island is facing its first real outbreak, that's looking more and more like a liability. Officials tightened restrictions and encouraged people to work from home, but of the more than 2,000 civil servants in the Taipei district where the outbreak is centered, just 83 worked from home on Monday. Some firms have redirected workers from hot zone locations to other offices around the city.
As of Thursday, the government shut down schools island-wide and continues to emphasize remote work or "pandemic leave," though both are at an employer's discretion. Chen said officials could, for example, use Covid stimulus funds to cover the cost of paid leave linked to the pandemic. So far, they haven't.
These fault lines have emerged around the world over the past 15 months. In Taiwan, the inability to support particularly women and caretakers in general is particularly poignant: According to estimates from the CIA, it has theworld's lowest birth rate at 1.07, a little more than half the "replacement rate" needed to keep a population stable.
For the past year-and-a-half, Taiwan has looked like a haven, the one place acing the pandemic. In the past month, it's looked a lot more like everywhere else in the world.—Isabella Steger | 
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