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Beyond Tokenism: The Institutional Conversion of Party-Controlled Labour Unions in Taiwan's State-Owned Enterprises* (1951–86)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2012

Ming-sho Ho
Ming-sho Ho*
Affiliation:
National Taiwan University. Email: mingshoho@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article challenges the accepted view that during the period of martial law Taiwan's labour unions were “a useless token.” Focusing on the petroleum and sugar industries, I analyse the incremental process of how party-state control over the labour unions was converted by the workers themselves in Taiwan's national enterprises. In the early 1950s, the KMT's policy of unionizing enterprises was a complementary strategy to reinforce its slow and unsuccessful party-state penetration. With the unions' prominent role in welfare provision, workers were encouraged to develop a sense of stakeholdership. Over the years, labour unions legitimatized the interests of worker members and thus gave rise to an explosion of claim-making activities – what I call “petty bargaining.” By the mid-1980s, labour unions, although still dominated by the KMT, were no longer a Leninist transmission belt, but rather functioned as a de facto complaint centre – an often overlooked precondition for the rise of post-1987 independent labour unionism.

Keywords

labour unionparty-statelabour activisminstitutional conversionLeninismTaiwanKMT
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 212 , December 2012 , pp. 1019 - 1039
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2012 

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Footnotes

*

This research is supported by Taiwan's National Science Council (97-2410-H-110-052-MY3, 100-2410-H-002-129-MY2). The author thanks Patricia Thornton, Steve Tsang, Yubin Chiu and anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions. The assistance of Chunhao Huang and Mei Lan Huang is appreciated.

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