Labour Identities in Taiwan: The Impact of Worker Representation
Work Matters - 27th International Labour Process Conference
6-8 April 2009
Apex International Hotel, Edinburgh, UK
Hsiao-Hui Tai
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
ABSTRACT
The worker representation has been implemented for a long time in Taiwan. Different types of mechanisms take place including institutions regulated by the state, initiated by the union as well as formalised by the company. However, how does labour representation influenceworkers and how are workers’ subjective identities affected? Two foci of this research includethe sorts of worker representation in workplacesand the differences of identities between labour representatives and ordinary workers in Taiwan.This research focuses on a case studyof one unionised company involving participant observation, in-depth interviews with worker representatives as well as union officers, a survey of ordinary workers and documentary analysis. The identity of worker representatives is changing from unconsciousness of distinctive worker interests to identification with the subordinate status of labour, but ordinary workers may not have the same experiences as well.
Introduction
The issue of identity is sensitive but problematic in Taiwan. People talk about their identities of nation, politics, ethnicity, communities, but not of work. For example, one person’s political identity can be defined as ‘pan-blue’ as conservative, or as ‘pan-green’ as liberal. Besides, conflicts of ethnic identities exist between Hoklo, mainlanders, Hakka, aborigines, foreign spouses, and so on. However, the identity of social class does not make any sense in Taiwan (Marsh, 2002). Because of the Confucianism and paternalism in societies as well as in workplaces, people used to work in a relationship of ‘family’ with their employers instead of employment relationships(Wu, 1999). They would believe themselves to be partners of the businesses rather than employees(Shieh, 1997).
The Nationalist Partyor Kuomintang (KMT) has dominated Taiwanese industrial relations for several decades, stipulating all kinds of labour legislation, manipulating trade unions as the supplementary means of authority, and even intervening industrial conflicts. The logic of its ruling, as Öniş (1991) analyses, was that fewer political and business elites could better formulate and rationalise the political economy. The industrial policy, which was formulated by cooperation and interaction amongst these politicians, bureaucrats and business elites, resulted in the industrial peace and industrial relations without the ‘voice’ or autonomy of trade unions. Unions were set up to support the state and the capital and used to play the weakest role of industrial relations until 1980s (Chen et al., 2003, Lee, 1999, Öniş, 1991, Shieh, 1997, Wu, 1999).
Moreover, the enactment of the Labour Standards Act as the core of Taiwanese labour legislation in 1984 and the lifting of martial law in 1987 were two landmarks of industrial relations in Taiwan. Prior to these, the state set up the Council of Labour Affairs in 1983 and started loosening its control of industrial relations (Chen et al., 2003, Wu, 1999). The Labour Standards Act provides the minimum standards for working conditions, protects workers’ rights and interests, improves relationships between employees and employers as well as promotes social and economic developments. Nevertheless, terms and conditions of any agreements between an employer and a worker should not be worse than the minimum standards provided by this regulation.
Besides, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which was established in 1986, one year before the lifting of martial law, was the first opposition party in Taiwan. Being a pro-labour party, the DPP originated all kinds of social movements concerning political justice, human rights, environment, and so on. After having participated in various local and parliamentary elections, the DPP won the presidential election firstly in 2000 and again in 2004, and had been expected to transform Taiwanese industrial relations and to generate the independent trade unionism(Chen et al., 2003, Wu, 2003). During the eight years of its ruling, the DPP government aimed to coordinate the tension in workplaces, announced the policy of building the labour-management partnership, amended labour legislation, and reinforced mechanisms of non-union worker representation. However, the KMT took back the presidency after elections in May 2008.
Accordingly, different mechanisms of non-union employee representation in businesses are established or reinforced, and labour legislation is reformed to secure labour rights. However, how does worker representation influence workers and their own consciousness in workplaces? How are workers’ subjective identities affected when they play the role of labour representatives? From the perspective of a union, this study investigates the worker representation systems in Taiwan with two foci: what sorts of worker representation have been implemented in workplaces, as well as what are the differences of identities between labour representatives and ordinary workers in Taiwan.
A cast study of oneTaiwanese steel corporation that is anonymous as ‘CS’has been explored to answer these questions. This research involved participant observation in the company in July and August 2003, in-depth interviews with worker representatives, union president, union chief secretary and union officers in October and November 2003 and April and August 2007, a survey of ordinary workers in December 2007, and documentary analysis of meeting minutes, official letters as well as internal documents.
The company ‘CS’ was set up in December 1971, became state-owned in July 1977, and was privatised in April 1995. In November 2007, it owned a capital valued at 2 billion pounds sterling and hired 9,076 employees of whom less than 2% were female and approximately65% were operating workers. The average age of employees was 48 years old and the annual turnover rate of workforce was less than 1%. On the other hand, the ‘CS’ union was set up in December 1980 and held its initial direct presidential election in November 2001, which was the first of its kind in Taiwan because the Labour Union Law only legalises the indirect election of the union president. Currently, it has 8,900 members and is the biggest single-plant industrial union within in Taiwan, offering members various welfare and fringe benefits ranging from pensions to children scholarships.
The paper is structured as follows. The next section briefly reviews the definition of identity as well as labour identities in Taiwan. The third section discusses the mechanisms of non-union worker representation in Taiwan from the research case and the relationship of union and non-union representation. Section four examines the identity of worker representatives whilst section five analyses the identity of ordinary workers. The final section provides the findings and conclusion of this research.
Labour Identities in Taiwan
The conception of ‘identity’ emerges from multiple sets of meanings. Leidner (2006: 427)defines one set is based on the identities of individuality and collectivity. Individuality embraces ‘the life history, and set of social relations that constitute the person,’ but collective identities concern ‘patterns of shared identification’, such as race, nationality, gender and class. Another set of identity meanings concerns people’s self-identity and the identity other people attribute to them. The former concerns how people recognise themselves and how ‘each individual develops an idea of who and what they are (Watson, 1995: 126)’, and the latter is how others perceive them. The third set revolves around personal identity versus social identity. Personal identity comprises definitions and conceptions people have found to represent them exactly based on their past experiences, whereas social identity contains the arranged position between their personal identity and the definitions and conceptions demanded of them in their present social context (Thompson and McHugh, 2002).
Thompson and McHugh (2002) further indicate that identity sociologically includes concepts of self as well as concepts of roles and reference groups, and this sense of identity helps people not only defend against challenges from outer control but also helps them to interact with other people who could help them in their defence. People struggle to exert control over their environment and fight against pressures to define their identity for them in order to sustain their identity. Therefore, ‘identity is the basis of individual involvement in organisations, and the basis for navigating and negotiating transactions between organisational strategies of control and individual strategies for securing identity (Thompson and McHugh, 2002: 339)’.
Leidner (2006)believes that four aspects are interconnected between identity and the sociology of work. First, one person is usually shown as advantageous goods on the labour market from his or her self-discipline and development. Then, the idea of career always directs to how to arrange one’s life and construct one’s identity. Third, many kinds of culture, disciplines, and choices construct identity through the work of different professionals, officials, dealers, consultants and so on. Finally, the roles of worker and consumer should be vague and close.When poststructuralist thinking is applied to organisational control it allows us to move towards worker’s subjectivity aroused by labour process theory in various ways. First, consideration is shifted to some extent from collective identity to more tricky individual identity. Second, although the workplace is a location of power relationships and of identity, the resources to maintain a protected and sovereign work identity are actually derived from circumstances beyond the workplace. Third, discussion of workers’ subjectivity has been expanded to encompass actions towards management rather than only resistance to management. Fourth, individuals’ concern to build an absolute identity is a result of captivation in power relationship (Leidner, 2006).
Baugher (2003) examined the worker identity among workers who joined in employee participation schemes in a General Motors plant in the United States. He found that those who participated became a ‘man in the middle’ in the workplace, feeling the tension between upper management and the rank and file. However, more than three-fourths of his interviewees believed their main responsibility was to represent their team members whilst they are positioned between operators and management. He considered some classic theories including Marxist, Weberian and Durkheimian, and concluded that the Durkheimian perspective on workplace norms is the most important factor in constructing workers’ loyalties.
Industrial relations in Taiwan was extraordinarily peaceful without labour voices before the lifting of Martial Law in 1987, and the state manipulated trade unions as creatures of its political propaganda (Chen et al., 2003, Lee, 1999). Companies managed employees using various contrivances limited only by national regulations. Workers were subordinated to capitalism as well as to the state. In contrast, after the lifting of Martial Law, plant closures and labour disputes emerged rapidly, whilst the state passively intervened in and some cases failed to intervene at all in an attempt to escape from the disputes. The absence of the government involvement resulted in more despotic employers and more exploited labourers (Shieh, 1997).
Comparing his study with Burawoy (1979), Shieh (1997) researched subcontracted networks of workers and workers paid-by-the-piece in Taiwan and indicated that shaping the subjectivity of labour is a dynamic process of development. Work paid by the piece implies complete commercialisation of labour. Workers and employers have a common view of labour and labour force of piece workers as real commodities. Employers who simultaneously do piecework alongside piece workers regard piece workers as their co-workers or partners and consider that there is only a pure bargaining relationship of prices between two sides. Labourers of pieceworkbelieve that the work-wage relationship is only an exchange on the commodity market rather than the labour market and then agree not to be paid additionally for weekends or holidays. As a result, workers are not aware of that the employment relationship exists until a labour dispute occurs (Shieh, 1997).
Shieh (1997) introduced the notion of piece-working consciousness resulting from piecework and consisting of four aspects. First, workers view themselves as ‘small bosses’ taking charge of their own risk. Second, the ‘labour only’ consciousness makes workers regard their labour as pure commodities. Third, workers come to the factory when there is work but go home whenever there is no work, moving freely but actually standing by at times without pay. Virtually free consciousness is constructed. Fourth, the blurring of the employment relationship results in a specificconsciousness of class with which piece workers believe that the contributors to the workplace are themselves as partners of the business, rather than the management who are the real employers. As a result, Shieh (1992) named Taiwan as a ‘boss’ island.
Marsh (2002) studied social class identity in Taiwan with data from a 1992 survey in which respondents chose one category of six classes: upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, working and lower classes, and 41% of respondents selected middle class butonly 29% selected working class(Chiu, 1992). However, Marsh (2002)argued that social class identity is fairly unimportant in Taiwan because people’s attitudes towards class are not influenced by their class identity and in fact people might not choose one of the above classes if they had the option to say they are not belonging to any class category in that survey.
To sum up, this research aims to understand the self-identity or personal identity of worker representatives and workers. These aspects of identity are therefore discussed: how they recognise themselves, who and what they think they are or they should be, and how they find to represent themselves according to their experiences of worker representation in the workplace.
Non-Union Representation in Taiwan
Various types of non-union representation take place in Taiwan, including institutions regulated by the state, formulated by the company, as well as initiated by the union, such as the employees’ welfare committee, quality circles and worker directors. According to relevant labour legislation, some legal mechanisms are implemented, including the labour-management conferences, the employees’ welfare committees and so on, because the state makes its efforts to coordinate the tension of workers and employers at the workplace level. From the case of ‘CS’, mechanisms of non-union representation can be distinguished in three sorts, which are mechanisms regulated by the government, proposed by the union and formulated by the company.
Mechanisms Regulated by the State
Worker representation systems have been formalised in Taiwan since the late 1920s. The first kind of worker representation can be traced back to 1929 when the Nationalist Government enacted the Factory Law to create factory committees.Factory committees were organised monthly by the same numbers of representatives of both workers and employers to discuss issues regarding employment relations, such as increasing work efficiency, improving the relationship between factory management and workers, assisting with the implementation of work contracts and factory rules, reforming the terms and conditions of the factory, and planning workers’ fringe benefits.
The non-union representation in Taiwan consists of four legal committees convened by both labour and management representatives in all enterprises, including labour-management conferences, employees’ welfare committees, labour safety and health committees, and supervisory committees of worker’s retirement reserve funds. The most important one amongst these committees is the labour-management conference because almost all issues in the workplace can be proposed and discussed at the forum. The other three meetings are specified with different areas in workplaces as their titles indicate.
According to the Convocation Rules of the Labour-Management Conference which was announced in 1985 and amended in 2007, the organisation, structure and issues of a labour-management conference are regulated, but there is neither penalty nor fine for employers who refuse to hold the labour-management conference (Wei, 2003). The paradox is that the rights of representatives are not as ‘real’ in practice as a system of the ‘co-determination’. The issues being dealt with in labour-management conferences are matters relating to the harmonisation of industrial relations and labour-management cooperation, relating to working terms and conditions, the planning of labour welfare and the increase of labour productivity, but are not the critical issues concerning workers’ working terms and conditions or the enterprise’s basic operation. Labour-management conferences do not have any essential impacts on businesses (Cheng, 2000, Huang et al., 2003).
Furthermore, decisions taken at the labour-management conference are not obligatory, even though the meeting takes place regularly and smoothly (Cheng, 2000, Huang et al., 2003, Wei, 2003). If the enterprise were not willing to implement decisions made by the conference, workers could not ask any unbiased outsiders for conciliation or arbitration, even if they conceived the enterprise did not think highly of the labour-management conference. These crucial problems of the institution of labour-management conferences provide employers with the means to avoid sharing influence with workers, and as a result, there are fewer labour-management conferences currently being held in Taiwan. Sometimes workers feel powerless when they try to participate in labour-management conferences, because employers do not favour the practices of labour-management conferences in businesses.