Taipei We were on the hunt for union and labor activists in Taiwan. I remembered that some twenty years ago, plus or minus, either a labor federation or someone had invited and financed a visit from an ACORN representative with our Living Wage Center to come to the island to help spark the campaign here. Reaching out to the two labor federations and their international offices didn’t yield a response, and, maybe, that was just as well, since both were heavily identified with the two main political parties. We were able to cobble together some connections to labor activists and to established union industry federations in order to get some understanding of the situation for non-migrant workers.
There seem to be a number of pieces to the Taiwan labor code, and fights to raise the minimum wage, especially for young workers, as conducted by Youth Labor Union 95 over the last fifteen years have been important as well. The 95 spoke to the number of New Taiwan dollars per hour, which would be in the neighborhood of $3 USD per hour. Yu-Hsuan “Catta” Chou with the Taiwan Federation of Financial Unions, was very helpful. The federation, where she is Deputy General Secretary, is composed of 37 different unions representing 26 of the nationally registered banks in Taiwan. They don’t have a collective agreement yet, but are putting the pieces together. Catta had also been active in the 95 effort as a student, and was also involved with the NGO Union, an effort to unionize the staffs of nonprofit organizations in the country. Lennon Ying-Da Wang from Service the People Association was also a longtime labor activist, who also helped us get a grip on the big picture for unions.
The large federations do not organize. Like many of the industry-specific federations, they have few staff. Union dues are paid voluntarily and is very low, about 100 NT or $3USD per month. Out of that small amount, a fraction becomes the per capita payment to the federations. The ability to strike is limited and either banned or requires a lot of steps to become sanctioned, including a certified vote of over 50% of the union members calling for the action. Unions, where they exist, are enterprise or company specific, neither sectoral or multi-employer, which also creates organizational challenges in some industries. Registering a union did not seem difficult, requiring only thirty members to petition to establish the organization, but building power from that point forward was challenging.
Public employees are often barred from union membership, partly from the Chinese tradition of such jobs being elite and achieved by rigorous testing. Teachers have a federation. We met the head of the national teachers’ union who was on a huger strike in front of the legislative assembly. He had been forced into this tactic by inaction by that body in fully funding and maintaining the pension fund for teachers. His solitary courage showed the limits of the labor laws providing tools for workers’ direct action. Railroad workers had been able to force some concessions in recent years because of their economic leverage. It was complicated, but it seems that gig workers have some protections on wages even if their employment status is still murkier than formal workers. Tech workers in the huge chip industries are not unionized.
There is a minimum wage. There is national health insurance. There are laws requiring overtime pay at different levels between 1.3 times hourly to double time. Homeownership is difficult, but rents are generally affordable. Transportation is cheap relative to other cities and countries, and used extensively because of its affordability. Median wages were reported at over the equivalent of $17,000 USD with gains for workers under 30.
In short, formal, non-migrant workers do have some protections and safety nets. What they don’t have is a path to power, and that seems deliberate as part of successive government policies. Talking to younger organizers and veterans of the Sunflower Movement, the government and industry better pay attention, because they haven’t given up the fight for justice at the workplace in addition to the other democratic reforms.