Abstract
This article seeks to explain the conditions that determine the divergent fates of union actors under democratic governments by examining union activism around four labor reform episodes (union rights recognition, wage increases, workweek reductions, and job protection/anti-privatization) in democratized Korea and Taiwan. This study first describes that labor reform politics in these two new democracies involved contrasting processes and produced divergent outcomes. Korean unions that have resorted to contentious mobilization have been more successful in areas where their sheer mobilizing strength matters (such as company-level bargaining of wages and other material benefits), but less successful in national policy reforms. On the contrary, Taiwanese unions have been more effective in securing labor policy concessions, while obtaining less drastic changes at the company-level gains. This article contends that these divergent outcomes for unions’ gains would not have been possible without the differences they faced in the degree of permeability within their respective formal political institutions and partisan interests that draw these unions into these labor reform politics.
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Notes
These four labor issues were chosen based on extensive research in Korea and Taiwan, which include over 100 interviews with union activists, labor scholars, and labor-related bureaucrats over the last five years (2000-2005).
Late developers’ export-driven growth strategy requires low wages because the competitiveness of labor-intensive products in the international market depends on price competitiveness. Developmental authoritarian regimes thus suppressed labor for the success of their economic development plans in addition to their intent to preempt political dissent in workplaces.
These old unions had been organized and sponsored by authoritarian regimes. They were recognized as the single legal national center until 2000 when the second national centers were finally legalized.
Most notably, the so-called “three vicious clauses” that prohibited union pluralism, union’s political activities, and the involvement of third parties in union affairs remained unchanged.
Before the amendment, unions could be organized only in enterprises employing more than 30 workers.
Dangwai literally means “outside of the party (KMT),” and it originated from an alliance of two types of anti-KMT opposition groups: local politicians who shared a strong dissatisfaction with the KMT rule and dissident intellectuals who aspired to democracy and human rights in Taiwan. One faction within the dangwai, the New Tide, was particularly concerned about and involved in organizing labor.
Kaohsiung City was the only exception, which had a KMT mayor at the time. However, the DPP politicians in Kaohsiung threatened to freeze the city budget to have the union federation established and recognized. This was possible because union leaders in the city announced that they would raise the issue of the federation’s establishment in the upcoming election. The application for establishing the Kaohsiung Federation of Industrial Unions was approved before the 1998 mayoral election (Author’s interview with Yuan-yen Ding, general-secretary of Kaohsiung city government, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, April 7, 2003).
He had made several campaign promises that he would promote industrial democracy by expanding codetermination, eliminating the “one workplace one union” provision, legalizing multiple unions, and reexamining the policy regarding the privatization of public enterprises (Lee 2004: 4).
Korea and Taiwan use a different measurement of labor disputes: the Korea Ministry of Labor counts labor disputes that involved a stoppage of operation at the shop floor, while the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs counts all levels of labor disputes. Therefore, direct comparisons of the number of labor disputes would not make much sense, but proportions of labor disputes caused by different issues provide comparable information.
This spring offensive is called Choontoo, which is similar to the Japanese Shunto.
Wages in Korean firms consist of a base wage and allowances in addition to overtime pay and year-end bonuses. The kinds and amounts of allowances are determined particularly by company-specific collective agreements. Large, unionized conglomerates have provided a variety of benefits such as allowances for dependent family, employment continuance, housing, marriage, tuition, child care, winter preparation, and recreation.
Inflation rates for Korea (1986-2002): 4.45 %, for Taiwan 2.26 %
The average weekly working hours of 23 OECD countries from 1981 to 1990. Italy was excluded due to discrete data.
The Korea Tripartite Commission was set up in 1998 under the Kim Dae Jung government. Its legal status is an advisory body for the presidential office. The Commission consists of 15–20 members who represent government, labor, business, and public interest (usually represented by labor scholars or leaders of civic organizations), and has several subcommittees (KTC 2003). The KCTU had initially joined the KTC and signed the 1998 social pact. However, it soon left the KTC when its rank-and-file members voted the KCTU leadership after their members perceived their leaders as being too compromising.
The implementation of the 40-hour workweek spread over six years from 2004 and finalized in 2010. The initial implementation of the law affected less than 10% of the total labor force (KTC 2003).
Valence issues are defined as political issues that politicians capitalize on by seeking voters’ comparative evaluations of the competing candidates’ levels of competence, honesty, or charisma (Adams et al. 2005: 14).
The National Federation of Industries and the National Association of Industry and Commerce.
Korean SOE unions are almost equally divided between the FKTU and the KCTU.
The government party passed the bill at 4 a.m. in the morning of December 26 without even notifying the members of the opposition parties for the vote in the National Assembly. It took seven minutes to pass the labor bill along with 10 other bills!
They include all forms of irregular labor force such as temporary, part-time, dispatch workers.
This clause stipulated that national-level union pluralism (i.e., the KCTU) would become legal from 2000, while shopfloor-level union pluralism would be granted from 2007.
In 1993, the Kim Young Sam government announced its plan to privatize about 60 out of 120 SOEs within a five-year span. The plan failed to be carried out due to public resentment against further economic concentration of the chaebols, which would have been the primary beneficiaries of this proposed transfer of ownership (Lee and Hwang 2000).
Already by 1994, 27 SOEs had formed the Anti-Privatization Association.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of this manuscript and their critical and constructive comments. One of the reviews was particularly helpful in terms of rethinking the impact of historical legacies on present labor movements. Thanks to their comments, I was able to further clarify the arguments I present in this article.
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Lee, Y. Divergent Outcomes of Labor Reform Politics in Democratized Korea and Taiwan. St Comp Int Dev 44, 47–70 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9034-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9034-8