Abstract
Taiwan is not known as a country of much labor activism or of any special pattern of class politics, and thus its labor movement has received little attention in the literature. Ming-sho Ho’s Working Class Formation in Taiwan will be a valuable addition to this scant literature on Taiwan’s labor movement.
The purpose of the book is to analyze “how Taiwan’s workers in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) managed to change their subordination and dependence in the 1945–2012 period” (p. ix). The focus of the study is on the SOE workers, not on the entire working class, and within the SOE sector, on two groups of workers: petroleum and sugar workers. This delimitation of the study population is justified, given the large size of SOEs and their leading role in Taiwan’s labor movement in recent years. The author has conducted intensive interviews with workers in the petroleum and sugar industries.
This book demonstrates that Taiwan’s labor history was indeed characterized by a remarkable degree of labor docility and “industrial peace” during the period of rapid industrial development since the early 1960s. Hardly any significant labor conflicts or unionization struggles occurred until the late 1980s. The phrase “working class formation,” thus, appears somewhat unfit to describe Taiwan’s labor situation during the industrial era. The active unionization movement did occur, however, following political liberalization in 1987. But the militant union movement of this period did not last long; it began to recede in the early 2000s as Taiwan’s economy was transformed under the impact of neoliberal globalization. Preoccupied with their own job security, which was being threatened by privatization and neoliberal labor market reform, rank-and-file workers quickly abandoned their union activism and returned to their usual passivity. The highly politicized union movement that emerged in the post-1987 period, which the author calls “social movement unionism,” quickly declined and gradually turned into the narrow “economic unionism” by the early 2000s.
But the main concern of the study is not really with this larger picture of working class formation or its absence. Instead, the author’s primary interest is in capturing diverse forms of worker resistance under the façade of labor submission and passivity. Three substantive chapters of the book are concerned with these mundane forms of resistance (“everyday resistance”), while only one chapter is devoted to describing the rise and fall of militant unionism since the late 1980s.
The major thesis of the book is that intraclass division can play a more important role in promoting labor activism than interclass division. “The experience of Taiwan’s SOE workers,” the author argues, “offers us a case in which the intraclass rather than interclass divide gives rise to workplace contentions. . . . it is their internal difference [sic] that fuel labor activism” (p. 186). He stresses three forms of intraclass division among the Taiwanese workers: ethnicity (between the Taiwanese and the mainlander Chinese), party (KMT) membership, and job position within the workplace. He regards these three bases of division as “institutions” and stresses historical institutionalism as his principal theoretical approach. Having identified these internal cleavages among the workers, the book describes in detail how workers adapted to the authoritarian industrial structure. The following paragraph summarizes the main finding of the study: They [workers] adopted a ritualistic strategy to keep politics at bay in the face of the party-state’s effort to extract their loyalty. Instead of working hard to obtain job promotion, they used their social connections (guanxi), bribery, and flattery to please their superiors. With booming business opportunities, state workers moonlighted to gain extra economic resources. Ritualism, gunaxi, and moonlighting were Taiwan’s state workers’ successive responses to their powerlessness. Workers managed to maintain their minimal autonomy with these petty acts of insubordination in difficult times. (p. xi)
Highlighting these diverse forms of everyday resistance and assuming they are produced by intraclass divisions, Ho argues that “polarization within a class, therefore, turns out to be no less a powerful driving force of worker radicalism than between classes” (p. 186). This is a questionable extension of the argument. Stressing the existence of these mundane resistant activities is one thing, but assuming that they had a certain causal effect on the emergence of worker radicalism in the later period is another. Unfortunately, this book presents no serious attempt to examine the latter.
Concerning the rise of the militant union movement in the late 1980s, Ho correctly argues that “Taiwan’s labor movement was cast in the crucible of democratic transition” (p. 147). “It suddenly burst onto the scene with the crisis in authoritarian control and gradually faded away as democracy was consolidated” (p. 178). Ho describes close linkages developed between labor activists and anti-KMT political opposition (Democratic Progressive Party). As most other analysts agree, ethnicity has played the most critical role in fostering political movement in Taiwan; and its labor movement has risen and declined in close association with this political movement. Ironically, as Ho observes, “The coming of the DPP government in 2000 marked the consolidation of Taiwan’s young democracy and, unexpectedly, the gradual demise of social-movement unionism” (p. 179). By “social-movement unionism,” he refers to “the more proactive and militant style of unionism that seeks to challenge class society, rather than merely protecting members’ interests.” This is a very broad and loose definition of the term, and I wonder whether other scholars of the Taiwan labor movement would agree with such a characterization. In any event, Ho’s main point is that Taiwan’s SOE workers’ social-movement unionism was largely a transitional phenomenon, followed by more routine forms of resistance.
Overall, Ming-sho Ho’s book is very interesting and well documented. The amount of scholarship and research that went into this book is very respectable, and it is written in clear and eloquent prose. The author demonstrates an impressive knowledge of theoretical and comparative literatures on the labor movement. I believe this book will be a major reference work on Taiwan’s labor studies.
But I must say that this is more a book on the everyday resistance of Taiwanese workers than on the process of working class formation in Taiwan. To be the latter, the book would have had to pay closer attention to the questions of class solidarity and consciousness—how these were promoted or diluted by intraclass division and everyday resistance—and to concrete class dynamics involved in the rise and fall of the radical union movement. Despite a meticulous description of how Taiwan’s workers adapted to the industrial system, the study says little about what these workers were thinking about their class reality (class awareness) and how they developed their collective sense of identity and solidarity as a class. Thus, the study does not explain the linkage between the mundane labor resistance from before the 1980s and the emergence of militant unionism in the 1980s. Was the latter just a product of political democratization, or was it in some way prepared by earlier working-class experiences; and if the latter, exactly how?
Another underdeveloped aspect of the book is that although the author is committed to a comparative perspective and often cites references drawn from the western labor literature, he pays very little attention to other East Asian cases. It is somewhat surprising that he hardly mentions the South Korean labor movement that provides such a contrasting case to Taiwan’s. By taking too much of a western-oriented perspective, he missed an opportunity to produce a more interesting and relevant comparative analysis.