Typhoon Day: Whose Day Off, Whose Shift

30-second overview: In 2001, teacher Hsu Pi-lan of Qingshan Elementary School in Changhua County died while on duty during a typhoon, shocking Taiwan society and prompting the government to establish a clearer typhoon-day system. But more than two decades later, yes123 surveyed 1,330 workers and found that 81% had reported to work as usual during a typhoon. Figures from 1111 Job Bank further show that 37.7% received no pay at all. Every summer, the moment county and city mayors announce work suspension, that piece of paper conceals a deeper problem: this day off has never been a day off for everyone.

The Drainage Ditch One Teacher Never Crossed

When Typhoon Toraji arrived in late July 2001, teacher Hsu Pi-lan was at Qingshan Elementary School in Changhua County.¹

Moderate Typhoon Toraji made landfall in Hualien and pushed westward. Heavy rain fell across Changhua County. While moving around campus to protect students' safety, Hsu Pi-lan accidentally fell into a drainage ditch and was swept away by powerful floodwaters.

She died in the line of duty. Then-President Chen Shui-bian went personally to the mourning hall to pay his respects. The accident shook Taiwan society and forced the government to confront a set of questions: Should people get a day off during a typhoon? What should the criteria be? Who gets to decide?

But before asking "who gets to decide," Taiwan had already had a legal answer for decades. As early as July 1974, the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration under the Executive Yuan had promulgated the Directions for the Suspension of Office and Class Operations During Natural Disasters. The regulation had existed all along. It simply had not been taken seriously until a teacher failed to cross a drainage ditch.²

Every Work-Suspension Decision Is a Gamble for Mayors and Magistrates

After the Hsu Pi-lan incident, the government gradually established clearer decision-making standards. On January 22, 2013, the Executive Yuan renamed the old directions as the Regulations Governing the Suspension of Office and Class Operations Due to Natural Disasters, placing typhoon days within a unified framework for all kinds of natural disasters.³

Current rules have two sets of trigger thresholds: sustained winds of level 7 or above, or gusts of level 10 or above; or 24-hour accumulated rainfall exceeding 200 millimeters in mountain areas and 350 millimeters in flatland areas. But the people who actually lead the decision are the mayors and magistrates of special municipalities, counties, and cities, not the central government.

In practice, this design has taken on unexpected forms.

Every announcement by a mayor or magistrate is a gamble. A quantitative political science study of 35 typhoon events between 2005 and 2015 put typhoon data and election results into a regression model. After controlling for unemployment, crime rates, education levels, and demographic structure, it reached this conclusion: every additional correctly granted typhoon day increased an incumbent's average vote share in a reelection bid by 2%.⁴

A policy decision that voters feel immediately is politics. Typhoon days are one of the few issues in Taiwan where everyone experiences a policy's effects at the same time: when the decision is right, everyone breathes a sigh of relief; when it is wrong, everyone is annoyed. Yet the study also found that incorrect decisions, whether granting an unnecessary typhoon day or failing to grant one when warranted, produced no significant electoral punishment for incumbents. What does this show? It shows that voters look at "getting the day off right," not accountability. The optimal strategy for politicians is therefore to wait for neighboring counties and cities to announce first.

This game reached a kind of peak during Typhoon Gaemi in 2024, when Taiwan recorded its first island-wide synchronized two-day closure since 2001. Because of its location and terrain, Yilan County has accumulated the most typhoon days over the years, with 47 days; Miaoli County has the fewest on Taiwan proper, with only 31 days.⁵

But This Arithmetic Completely Erases One Person

yes123 surveyed 1,330 workers: 81% had reported to work as usual during a typhoon, and 65% of them did so because a supervisor required it.⁶

1111 Job Bank's version is more specific: 76% of workers had gone to work during a typhoon; 53.5% received full pay, while 37.7% received no pay at all. Another 43.1% had no protective measures of any kind, and 12.2% received only verbal praise.⁷

These two surveys describe the everyday reality of Taiwan's typhoon days. The moment a county or city mayor announces work suspension, more than one-third of workers are still heading out into the typhoon without receiving a single cent of additional compensation.

The five industries with the highest attendance rates are mass communications and public relations at 90%, wholesale and retail at 88.6%, medical care and biotechnology at 86.7%, hospitality and food service at 85.7%, and agriculture, fishing, and livestock at 83.3%. This list is almost a directory of Taiwan's blue-collar workforce and frontline service industries.⁸

📝 Curator's Note

The conventional narrative is that "typhoon days let people in Taiwan rest at home." That narrative cuts precisely along a class line: white-collar office workers wait at home for the closure announcement, while workers in wholesale and retail, agriculture, fishing, livestock, and food service continue heading out into the same typhoon. The design of the system is not wrong, but its assumption is this: the people who "get the day off" have an office they can avoid going to. People at wholesale stalls, fish ponds, and restaurants were never part of that assumption.

Migrant Workers Are the Most Invisible Layer in the Structure

Taiwan has nearly 800,000 foreign migrant workers, most of whom are concentrated in manufacturing, construction, and agriculture, fishing, and livestock, which happen to be precisely the industries with the highest typhoon-day attendance rates.⁹

The situation they face is more complicated than the data suggests. Most migrant workers are paid monthly, so wage deductions during work suspension directly affect the amount they can remit home each month. Language and regulatory barriers also make it nearly impossible for them to proactively exercise the "right to retreat" or apply for typhoon-day allowances. This does not even account for the fact that their work is almost entirely on-site, with no option to work from home. More fundamentally, typhoon-day decisions are issued at the local level, and migrant workers sometimes do not even receive the notification.

The Ministry of Labor's regulations state in black and white that workers who report to work during a typhoon "should not have wages deducted, should not be treated as absent without leave, and should not be subject to adverse treatment such as deductions from full-attendance bonuses." Violators may be fined NT$20,000 to NT$1 million. But the word "should" is advisory, not mandatory. Enforcement is limited.¹⁰

Ninety-six percent of workers support legislating typhoon days as paid leave, including 64% of companies. But legislative progress has been extremely slow, because "possible serious impact on necessary services" is an all-purpose administrative reason for delay.

✦ "Every additional correctly granted typhoon day increases an incumbent's reelection vote share by 2%." This finding precisely describes the political grammar of typhoon days. What it does not say is this: for the 81% of people who still report to work as usual, were their votes counted too?

How Much Is Lost in One Day? Different Formulas Produce Very Different Answers

Before and after every typhoon day, media outlets routinely cite the figure "NT$31 billion to NT$31.5 billion in losses per day." Where does this number come from?

The basic calculation is this: using Taiwan's 2023 GDP of NT$23 trillion as a baseline, divide it by 365 days to get a daily output value of roughly NT$63 billion, then subtract the portion that continues operating during a typhoon, such as continuous operations at semiconductor fabs and some domestic consumption, to arrive at a net loss of about NT$31.5 billion.¹¹

Veteran media figure Huang Yang-ming recalculated it from an export perspective: Taiwan's total exports in 2023 exceeded US$430 billion, or more than US$1 billion per day. That item alone amounts to more than NT$31 billion. The two methods arrive at similar numbers, but from opposite positions: the former is used to argue that holidays should not be granted lightly; the latter is used to show that the cost of a day off is very high.¹²

The problem with this arithmetic is not the number itself. It is the missing line item: are the human costs paid by people who report to work during a typhoon included? Does the drainage ditch where Hsu Pi-lan died in 2001 count as part of that NT$31.5 billion?

The History of Typhoon Days Is a Lesson Paid for in Human Lives

The full statistics on Taiwan's typhoon days tell another layer of the story.

Since 2001, there have been only 14 island-wide typhoon days as of July 2024. The longest continuous closures occurred during Typhoon Morakot in 2009, when 10 counties and cities had three consecutive days off. Typhoon days mostly fall on workdays, contrary to online claims that they are often "wasted on weekends."¹³

The difficulty of cross-county coordination remains unresolved. Administrative boundaries were not designed around commuting zones, so the closure standards for where people live, work, and go to school may all differ. Scenarios in which "parents have to work while children are off at home" ignite waves of discussion on social media every few years. Counties and cities have tried regional joint-defense mechanisms, but typhoon tracks and terrain make synchronization nearly impossible.¹⁴

The system operates along twentieth-century administrative boundaries. Typhoons do not follow administrative boundaries.

Agriculture's Wounds: Typhoons Do Not Follow Administrative Boundaries, but Losses Are Counted by County and City

Discussions of typhoon days focus on urban white-collar workers and offices, but the sector struck most directly by typhoons each year is agriculture.

According to Ministry of Agriculture statistics, Taiwan's total agricultural disaster losses in 2023 reached NT$24.276 billion, of which typhoons accounted for 77.16%, or about NT$18.7 billion. In 2024, the figure was even more extreme: total agricultural disaster losses reached NT$52.651 billion, with typhoons accounting for 98.88%, almost entirely caused by three typhoons: Gaemi, Krathon, and Kong-rey.¹⁵

In 2025, Typhoon Danas caused NT$2.5 billion in agricultural losses: Tainan suffered the most, with NT$929 million in losses; banana losses reached NT$229 million; 445,000 chickens died; and 2,454 utility poles were damaged, setting a historical record.¹⁶

Bananas, papayas, citrus fruit, and bamboo shoots are the regular victims of each year's typhoons. Pingtung, Chiayi, Yunlin, and Tainan appear again and again on the disaster map. Farmers in these counties and cities already know the ending before a typhoon day is announced. At the same moment the work-suspension notice goes out, they are tying banana stems with agricultural tape, pulling oyster cages ashore, or standing on the ridge of a field doing nothing but waiting.

This loss does not enter the prominent calculation of average daily GDP, but it is one of the most neglected faces in the typhoon-day debate.

Typhoon Noodles and Stockpiled Cabbage Are Another Kind of System

Outside this official system, people in Taiwan also operate another informal pre-typhoon compact.

Filmmaker Lee You-zong has said that in Taiwan 30 years ago, typhoons almost always came with water and power outages. On the eve of a typhoon, mothers would fill the bathtub with water, fill the water dispenser, and go to the grocery store to buy batteries and candles. Older women went to the wet market to stockpile food, preparing crackers, canned goods, and instant noodles. After the power went out, the electric rice cooker could not be used, so the whole family would cook a bowl of noodle soup with canned mackerel in tomato sauce and crack an egg into it. Neighbors exchanged different flavors of instant noodles. This was the origin of "typhoon noodles." He said this habit is "carved into our bones, a symbol of having lived through it."¹⁷

According to an analysis by United Daily News's DailyView of online discussion volume over the past two years, from 2023 to 2025, the most commonly panic-bought items before typhoons were rice and noodles, followed by instant noodles in fourth place and drinking water in sixth. The phrase "a full rice bin equals full peace of mind" precisely captures an older logic: do not trust any system to protect you; protect yourself first.¹⁸

As electricity and water infrastructure have improved, people born in the 1990s and 2000s in Taiwan mostly no longer experience typhoon power outages, and this collective memory is rapidly breaking across generations. But the phenomenon of supermarkets being emptied in the two days before a typhoon has never disappeared. People may debate the effectiveness of the typhoon-day system, but typhoon noodles are a language everyone understands.

📝 Curator's Note

The official typhoon-day system and the popular culture of typhoon noodles are two answers to the same problem. The former tries to manage typhoon impacts through law and administrative decision-making; the latter bypasses any system directly, exchanging food stockpiles for a sense of safety. The coexistence of these two answers shows that people's memories of typhoons in Taiwan run deeper than their trust in any system.

The Other Side of Typhoon Days: Why Some People Say "Do Not Grant Them"

The claim that "Lin Por-fong, chair of the Third Wednesday Club, said one typhoon day costs NT$31.5 billion" resurfaces for discussion around every typhoon season. Behind it is a position from the business community: typhoon days are a luxury. Taiwan is an export-oriented economy. If factories stop for a day, that is a loss. Customers will not wait, and orders will leave.

This position is not wrong, but it chooses arithmetic that favors itself. The same arithmetic does not include the 81% of workers who report to work during typhoons, the 37.7% who receive no pay at all, or the vendors who hold umbrellas and wade through flooded streets to get to wholesale markets.

Japan's approach is another path: in some areas, typhoon days are automatically triggered after the Japan Meteorological Agency issues a special warning, and local governments implement the standards accordingly. They are not decided case by case by politicians. Hong Kong's mechanism is more direct: when the No. 8 storm signal is hoisted, all kinds of institutions automatically initiate work and class suspension procedures without requiring individual announcements by officials.

Taiwan's system is hybrid: there are statutory trigger conditions, but the final decision lies with county and city mayors. This design preserves local flexibility and also preserves room for political judgment. Which places' residents benefit and which places' residents continue reporting to work are quietly decided within that space each time.¹⁹

Changhua in 2001 and the Regulations of 2026

After teacher Hsu Pi-lan died in the line of duty, the government did act. But between "acted" and "changed," there is a silent distance.

The regulatory framework was established, the decision-making standards became clear, and the procedures by which mayors and magistrates make announcements became more public. Yet today, in 2026, when a typhoon comes, wholesale and retail workers still head out into the same typhoon, migrant workers are still required to work in situations where they have not received notice, and 37.7% of workers still receive no pay at all.

The system began with the death of a teacher. But the boundary of the system's change has remained stuck at the boundary of the public sector and the formal office.

Teacher Hsu Pi-lan was a public school teacher, one of the groups the system eventually came to protect. Precisely because of her death, later teachers gained clearer regulatory protection during typhoons. Her story was later placed in policy explanations, written into media reports, and included in schools' disaster-prevention materials.

But every summer, when the work-suspension announcement appears on a phone screen, the 81% are not waiting for that notice.²⁰

Further Reading

• Typhoon — A panoramic account of Taiwan's 400 years of coexistence with typhoons, from Qing-era settlers witnessing hurricanes in Penghu to Xiaolin Village in 2009
• Business Weekly, "Can Typhoon Days Really Please Small-Happiness Voters? Statistics Show: Only Correctly Granted Days Matter" — A quantitative political analysis of typhoon-day decision-making
• Coolloud, "As Typhoon Season Arrives, What Are We Waiting for in Legislating Paid Natural-Disaster Leave?" — A labor perspective on advocacy for writing typhoon days into law

References