A Taiwanese man came up with an ingenious of getting extended paid leave from work: he got married four times and divorced three times in just 37 days.

According to Taiwanese law, a person has the right to 8 days paid work leave when they get married, which is exactly what one unnamed clerk received when he got married last year, on April 6th. Only that was only meant as the beginning of an extended paid leave, for which the hero of our story had prepared in advance. On the last day of his 8-day leave, the man divorced his wife, only to marry her again the next day and ask for another paid leave, to which he felt he was entitled to, by law. He went on to marry the same woman four times, and divorce her three times in 37 days, for a total of 32 days of paid leave.

Photo: Olivia Bauso/Unsplash

But before you even thinking off pulling off a similar stunt, you should know that things didn’t go as smoothly as the protagonist of this story had hoped. Because he divorced and then married the same woman the next day, the bank he worked at figured out what he was trying to do, so it refused to grant him another eight days of paid leave. That didn’t sit too well with our hero…

After going ahead with his original plan, the bank clerk filed a complaint against his employer at the Taipei City Labor Bureau, accusing the bank of breaking the law by not abiding Article 2 of the “Labor Leave Rules”. It states that employees are entitled to 8 days of paid leave when they get married, and since he had gotten married 4 times, he should have received 32 days of paid leave.

The Labor Bureau launched an investigation into the matter reported by the clerk, and ruled that the bank had indeed violated the Labor Law. The employer was fined NT$20,000 ($700) in October of last year, but an appeal was launched, in which it claimed that its employee’s “malicious abuse of marriage leave was not a legitimate cause of leave under the ‘Labor Leave Rules’.

Photo: Bill Oxford/Unsplash

On April 10, the Beishi Labor Bureau reluctantly upheld the previous ruling, arguing that while the bank clerk’s conduct was unethical, he had not broken the law. The bank, on the other hand, had violated Article 2 of the “Labor Leave Rules”…

The case went viral on social media, sparking a heated debate between people who couldn’t believe such a loop hole existed in Taiwanese labor legislation, and those who accused the clerk of being unreasonable. Some actually confirmed that the law does allow anyone to pull of the same stunt as detailed above, but until last year, no one had actually done it.