The limited participation of workers on the level of government administration and legislation administration and legislation

Given the complexity of labor issues, in Taiwan’s institutionalized social structure, workers can only enter the discussion of labor issues within a highly-regulated arena of labor. With the Ministry of Labor as the highest administrative body in the area of labor, it is the only path for the political participation of Taiwan workers within the administrative structure.

Continuing the above discussion, actually the field of enterprise operation deeply influences the local labor market. The governmental administrative bodies that are related to enterprise operation, such as, to list just those at the level of the central government, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Economics, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, the Ministry of Culture, the

Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Development Council, and so on, are those government bodies and agencies that formulate and carry out the policies that shape and regulate the development of the various industries in Taiwan’s society. Even though this developmental model generally directly shapes the labor market in the relevant industry, the political participation of workers is almost never seen when these government agencies are formulating policy; only the Ministry of Labor is seen to have a voice in the administrative bodies.

So, first off, when the Ministry of Labor faces off against the policies proposed by the other agencies, it is a question of whether it has sufficient research capacity to submit a report on how the policy, given the particular characteristics of the industry in question, will affect the labor market. Secondly, if the administrative process is already to the stage of inter-agency negotiation or Executive Yuan meeting, then actually most of the policies for industry development have long since been set, and it is hard to get any real reconsideration. Thirdly, even if the policy will affect the labor market, the Ministry of Labor is only one member of the whole administrative apparatus, and usually it can only accept the situation as given, and wait for individual workers to seek relief and then deal with the outcome.

This cutting off of the labor market from the regulatory system of the administrative agencies causes fragmentation of labor issues, so they only appear to be concerned with unemployment welfare measures for individual workers.

The risk of structural unemployment³² is totally shifted onto the workers, so that the Ministry of Labor in the administrative system can only play the role of giving

“relief” to the workers after the outcome of unemployment. The Ministry of Labor usually is just a rubber stamp in policy decisions; so no wonder the Ministry of Labor is often derided as the “Ministry of Capital”³³.

Talking from the process of Taiwan’s economic development, when the traditional agricultural society was transformed into an industrial society, the early period of industrialization absorbed large amounts of the surplus labor in the agricultural labor market.

Much research in the discussion of this period of Taiwan’s industrialization concludes that the policies of the government of the ruling party, the Kuomintang, spurred Taiwan’s industrial transformation, and in fact were the main reasons for its success.

32 The usual definition of structural unemployment is that its main reason is change in the economic structure such that the original labor capacities do not match the needs of the market, leading to unemployment. This kind of unemployment in general arises because of change in the demand for labor; some scholars consider that the ultimate cause is that workers themselves have insufficient information on the economic market.

33 In response to the report that a public opinion survey showed 85% support for the Ministry of Labor’s proposed legislation for “one week, one holiday”, Kuomintang legislators Li Yanxiu and Wang Yuming, etc., stated that they were suspicious of the correctness of this survey, and that the Ministry of Labor under the DPP had become the “Ministry of Capitalist Moves”. This was reported in Tang Shi, Taiwan People News, July 11, 2016,“Blue Legislators charge that the Ministry of Labor has become the ‘Ministry of Capitalist Moves’”.

However, as industrialization has proceeded into the stage of post-industrial society, a central characteristic of the labor market is the technical expertise of workers. Industrialization deepens the dependence on workers with specialized technical abilities³⁴; but workers with more advanced technical abilities require a longer period of professional training, and the demands on them for self-investment through educational expenditure are greater, too. Moreover, their flexibility in retooling their technical abilities when the labor market shifts is more limited as well. Therefore, although their salaries are relatively high, their potential flexibility for changing careers is lower.

When one day the worker wakes up to the fact that the economic structure has changed, he finds that the technical abilities he has learned at great effort cannot be exchanged for a commensurate salary in the current labor market; he may easily become unemployed.

With the island-limited nature of Taiwan’s economic development, often the operators of enterprises, much less workers, may not be able to grasp the information on changes in the external market. And often the main reasons for changes in the economic structure are not coming from the demands of internal or external markets or from product transformations, but from government policies for industrial planning.

The workers all the same have no capacity to participate in the political system when the policies are in the process of planning; and they take on a kind of introverted stance in a system in which they have insufficient information about the external market. So how can the risk of structural unemployment be blamed on the workers, saying that their skills are not matched to the market needs, or caused by their lack of news about the employment market? Why should workers swallow all the bitter fruits of unemployment? Even more, why in post-industrial society, with its needs for labor in technical specialties, should the workers who are preparing to enter the labor force need to make a huge investment of their own in educational expenses and time in order to learn specialized professional skills?

To take for example the “Two Trillion and Twin Star Development Program” of the Ministry of Economics in 2001; the government determined that semi-conductors, image display technologies, digital industries, and biological technology industries would be the star industries of the future. Therefore, it poured in a huge amount of resources and encouraged cooperation between industry and universities. But, unfortunately, in pursuit of economic growth and achievement the government mismanaged finances on a huge scale and expanded public expenditures with redundant investments. The outcome was excess capacity of industry, imbalance of the industrial structure, ineffective allocation of productive resources, etc., with the result that in 2013 the program was dubbed “The Four Great Catastrophic Industries”³⁵.

34 Yang Zhousong, “The problem of the tendency towards commercialization in Taiwan’s higher education”, Association for Taiwan Educational Review 1, no. 2 (2011): 31-32.

35 Hong Chi-chang and Lee Kuo-cheng, “Taiwan economic dilemmas and industrial competition across the Taiwan Strait”, Mirror Magazine, January 2014.

Workers in preparation in entering college select the fields of study that are popular then; each university has one-by-one set up a department of photonics and recruited students with visions of a labor market with high salaries. But after a period of employment, or even just when graduating, the student discovers that the cycle of industrial development has already peaked, and with a change in the government’s industrial policy the industry has been systematically terminated.

Again, with the Ministry of Education’s policy of educational loans as an example, designed to meet the need of post-industrial society for highly-educated workers, and also the aspirations of Taiwan society’s parents that they can secure the careers of their children with education, the money and time put into education has been continually escalating. Not only has this become more of a burden than many young people can bear, it has become a heavy economic pressure on the average family.

In 1994 Taiwan’s Ministry of Education expanded its loan assistance, which was originally targeted at poor households only, to a policy of general educational loans³⁶. At present the number of persons with educational loans has reached 940,000 as of 2016, which is 22.5% of college students. Of those with loans, 320,000 are still students (including those in vocational high schools), and the other 620,000 persons have already started careers. If we analyze the numbers by public or private educational institution, students in private schools taking out loans are four times as numerous as those in public schools, and the total amount of the loans is six times greater. Reports are that students in the private technical schools are predominantly from economically weak households.

Chart 1.3. : Educational loan applicants and loan amounts in 2014

Public Colleges and Vocational Schools

Private Colleges and Vocational Schools

All

Students 59,798 241,866 301,664

Loans (in USD) 106,486,789 659,785,674 766,272,463

Loan per Student (in USD)

1,780 2,727 2,540

Source: Organized by the author from statistics of the Ministry of Education.

Because of the pressure of educational loans, it can be imagined that these workers in preparation, entering their careers for the first time, may, like the aforementioned workers suffering from structural unemployment, be compelled to accept lower conditions of employment, in order to improve their chances for employment. The attendant effect may be for workers in general to face a labor market with a downward pull on salaries.

36 Lin Chih-hsing, “A discussion on educational loans in our country”, Education and Development 27, no. 5 (October 2010): 87-94.

Added to this is the fact that most students in private schools are from economically less advantaged households, and the attendant effect may be that the economic pressure on their parents to pay back the educational loans may likewise cause them to accept poorer-paid work conditions; and through the magnifier effect of supply and demand in the labor market, those workers affected are certainly not just the students who took out the loans. Again, as above, this policy of educational loans sponsored by the Ministry of Education was arrived at by a process in which there was no discussion about labor issues or political participation of workers.

The results of inappropriate policy planning for a government administrative organ is probably just an evaluation report, or for appointed officials a change of venue for their career, or for civil service officials a transfer. But for the workers, an adjustment in the industrial structure brings the risk of unemployment, or instability in the labor market, and an impact that may influence their whole lives and even that of their progeny. The effect of the policies of the administrative organs on workers may be as pervasive as this. We might have the impression that a process of decision-making from which the political participation of labor is excluded may in fact even be an intentional result of the regulation by the political system.

Aside from this, from observing the process of formulating laws regulating labor among elected representatives, i.e. legislators, with the aforementioned work hours legislation as an example, we can compare how in every revision of the Basic Labor Law both labor and capital made detailed calculations of work time and payments. But if we start from the macro perspective of the intent of legislation and the circulation of the society’s economy, then we can only understand if labor conditions of enterprise operation hours and working shifts are reasonable and normal if we work through the implications of related minute details such as day/night differentials in electricity rates, income taxes on businesses with abnormal hours, prohibitions on large trucks using the freeways on holidays and weekends, and so forth.

However, these related considerations and measures have never appeared at the level of discussions in the Taiwan legislature on labor issues, not to say measures for the purpose of protecting workers or even assuring sustainable development of the society’s economy.

1.2.3. Obstacles to labor organization in the fragmentation caused by