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

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.