Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan 9780804781749

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Militants or Partisans

Militants or Partisans l a b o r u n i o n s a n d d e mocr at ic p o l i t i c s i n k o r e a a n d taiwan

Yoonkyung Lee

stanford university press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Special discounts for bulk quantities of Stanford Business Books are available to corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For details and discount information, contact the special sales department of Stanford University Press. Tel: (650) 736-1782. Fax: (650) 736-1784. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lee, Yoonkyung, 1965- author.   Militants or partisans : labor unions and democratic politics in Korea and Taiwan / Yoonkyung Lee.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-8047-7537-3 (cloth : alk. paper)   1.  Labor unions—Political activity—Korea (South)  2.  Labor unions—Political activity— Taiwan.  3.  Democracy—Korea (South)  4.  Democracy— Taiwan.  5.  Korea (South)—Politics and government.  6.  Taiwan—Politics and government.  I.   Title. hd6835.5.z65l44 2011 322.2095195 — dc22  2011004860 Typeset by Newgen in 10.5/13.5 Bembo

To my parents, Lee Byunghyuk and Lee H. Junghee

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes on Names and References 1.  Introduction 2.  Labor Politics: Realities, Theories, and Explanations

ix xi xv xvii 1 12

3.  Authoritarian Legacies and Democratic Coalitions in Korea and Taiwan 50 4.  Labor Unions and Political Parties in Democratized Korea and Taiwan

73

5.  Labor-Reform Politics in Democratized Korea and Taiwan

102

6.  Conclusion

141

Appendix A: Interviews and Participatory Observations Appendix B: National Legislators’ Career Background (NLCB) Data Notes References Index

149 153 155 165 177

List of Illustrations

Tables 2.1 Basic economic indicators: Korea and Taiwan

18

2.2 Labor-force composition by industry

19

2.3 SMEs in Korea and Taiwan

20

2.4 Common grounds of union organizations in Korea and Taiwan

36

2.5 Variety of labor politics in Korea and Taiwan

48

3.1 Chronology of political and economic development in Korea and Taiwan

51

3.2 Elections in Korea and Taiwan

70

4.1 National legislators’ career backgrounds in Korea and Taiwan: 1988 –2008

77

4.2 Absence of class voting in Korea: 1992 –2004

78

4.3 Party institutionalization in Korea and Taiwan

83

4.4 Korean parties’ membership size and dues-paying members in 2007

86

4.5 Supporters of the DLP

87

4.6 Workers’ voting in Taiwan: 1992 –2004

92

4.7 Ethnic background of party supporters in Taiwan

94

4.8 Vote shares of political parties in democratic Taiwan

98

x

List of Illustrations

5.1 Labor-reform politics in Korea and Taiwan: 1987–2007

104

5.2 Union rights and union pluralism in Korea and Taiwan

106

5.3 Korean workers in distress: 1971–2000

108

5.4 Taiwanese workers in distress: 1987–1992

109

5.5 Causes of labor disputes in Korea: 1990 –2004

111

5.6 SOEs in Korea and Taiwan: 1997–2002

122

5.7 Key SOEs and privatization in Korea and Taiwan

122

5.8 Taiwan’s independent union federations at the city/county level

126

5.9 Causes of labor disputes in Taiwan: 1989 –2004

128

5.10 Rigidity of Employment Index for Korea and Taiwan

140

A.1 Composition of in-depth interviewees

149

A.2 Participatory observations

149

Figures 2.1 Workdays lost because of labor disputes

14

2.2 Number of workers involved in labor disputes in Korea and Taiwan, 1989 –2007

15

2.3 Workdays lost because of labor disputes in Korea and Taiwan, 1989 –2007

16

2.4 Union density in Korea and Taiwan, 1987–2007

29

2.5 Union structure in Korea and Taiwan

34

2.6 Typology of partisan relations and labor politics

44

3.1 Votes for the KMT and opposition in supplementary legislative elections, 1969 –1992

67

4.1 Political parties in democratic Korea

82

4.2 Political parties, labor-movement groups, and unions in Taiwan

90

4.3 Political parties in democratic Taiwan

95

5.1 Real wage increases in Korea and Taiwan, 1986 –2007

112

5.2 Wage differentials by firm size in Korea, 1986 –2004

114

5.3 Wage differentials by firm size in Taiwan, 1986 –2004

129

Acknowledgments

When I first embarked on a study of this somewhat unpopular topic on Asian labor, it was hard to imagine that one day I would be writing acknowledgments before the manuscript’s publication. The day has come, and I am exuberated to write the names of the many people and institutions that aided and encouraged me to carry out this research project. First of all, I would like to thank Herbert Kitschelt, my dissertation advisor, who guided me to undertake a dissertation on labor unions in East Asia and carry it to its completion. His intellectual vigor, discipline, and acuity have been the guiding lights during my graduate studies at Duke University and beyond. My transformation from an activist to a scholar would not have been possible without his generous understanding and rigorous training. My sincere appreciation goes to Stephan Haggard for offering me a fellowship to spend a semester at the University of California at San Diego to write this manuscript. With unending inquisitiveness and a cheerful spirit, he was a wonderful mentor to nurture this study into publication. The arguments ­presented in this book were obviously sharpened thanks to his meticulous reading of all the chapters and the insightful criticisms he offered. I also want to extend my gratitude to the participants of two workshops Stephan organized at UC–San Diego, where I presented an earlier version of this manuscript. I am especially grateful to Jong-sung You, Jaejin Yang, Jinhee Choung, and Kuniaki Nemoto for the scholarly conversations and camaraderie we shared during my stay in San Diego.

xii

Acknowledgments

Hagen Koo is another person I am greatly indebted to. Although we have never worked in the same institution, he has shed tremendous intellectual influence on my study of East Asian labor through his lifetime of research on Korean workers as well as generous compliments and critical feedback on my research over the years. At the University of New York at Binghamton, where I teach and research, I am blessed to work with Fred Deyo, Ravi Palat, Benita Roth, and Leslie Gates, who with their invaluable collegial spirit helped me reevaluate my approach to labor studies from broader perspectives. I also want to thank the graduate students in the Sociology Department who took the seminar on “Democracy and Labor” I offered in fall 2009. The discussions in the seminar reaffirmed to me the significance of studying labor in the social sciences and provided me the impetus to get to the final revisions of the manuscript. I would like to further express my appreciation to two anonymous reviewers who carefully read the manuscript and offered invaluable and productive comments. Their reviews enabled me to strengthen and broaden the theoretical arguments in this study while clarifying the connections with comparative cases. Stacy Wagner and Jessica Walsh at Stanford University Press deserve special thanks for their enthusiasm, promptness, and editorial professionalism from the first contact to the last minute while transforming this manuscript into a book. It was a wonderful experience to work with them as a first-time book author. As a field researcher, I have also accrued a huge debt to many people in Korea and Taiwan. I thank Jangmin Kim, Taehyun Kim, Yoosun Kim, Hoichan Roh, and Kwangyoung Shin, who shared their insights and labor-related data and helped me better understand the historical and present complexities of Korean labor relations. During my field research in Taiwan, I immensely benefited from intellectual exchanges with Heng-hao Chang, Ming-sho Ho, Michael Hsiao, Chang-ling Huang, and Hwan-jen Liu. Special thanks go to Ru-hsin Chang, Jia-ning Hong, and Carry Su, who befriended me, translated for me, and guided me to find my way through their political histories and labor politics. Without the generous support and guidance from these scholars and activists who willingly shared the knowledge and experience they gained from their lifetime of dedication, this comparative study on labor would not have been completed. During my field research I met many workers, rank-and-file unionists, and union leaders whose names are not fully identified in this book. I perhaps owe the greatest debts of gratitude to them. I was humbled by their willing-

Acknowledgments

xiii

ness to spare their time to share their stories, expertise, and insights on labor politics in Korea and Taiwan with me. They not only inspired me to undertake this research project, but they also offered the crux of empirical evidence to connect the causal claims in this study. While I am entirely responsible for all the shortcomings of this book, I hope I am not misrepresenting their valuable contributions. My field research in Korea and Taiwan at different points of time between 2000 and 2008 was made possible by generous financial support from various institutions. I thank Duke University, the Association of Asian Studies, the University of California–San Diego, the United University Professions, and the State University of New York at Binghamton for offering various summer fellowships and research grants. This work was also supported by an Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean government (AKS-2007CB-2001) that provided the research fellowship at UC–San Diego. Finally, I want to thank my family and parents. My husband, Chaeho Shin, and my daughter, Isue Shin, have been the anchors and joys of my life. They accompanied me on this long journey from the inception to the completion of this study with their tremendous optimism and generous understanding. I was able to survive and balance my multiple roles as an academic professional, foreign immigrant, and mother/wife thanks to the laughter, patience, and encouragement that they infused into our family life. I feel blessed that they are a part of my life and that I am a part of theirs. This book is dedicated to my parents, Byunghyuck Lee and Junghee H. Lee, a dedication that is overdue for the immeasurable debt of gratitude I owe to them. My father has transmitted to me a passion for learning and has always encouraged me not to remain in a narrow well but to explore the “big” world. My mother is one of the most dedicated and empathetic persons I know. She may not realize how much she has taught me about the importance of attending to the weak and seeking justice. Together they have always stood behind me despite the turbulent path their “little” daughter took since her college years. Without their unwavering love, faith, and support, I don’t think I would be standing where I am now.

Abbreviations

ACFTU APEC CEPD CFL CLA DJP DLP DPP FKTU ILO KCIA KCTU KMT KTC LRA MOEA MOL MPB NCTU NP OECD PFP PRC

All-China Federation of Trade Unions Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Council for Economic Planning and Development (Taiwan) Chinese Federation of Labor (Taiwan) Council of Labor Affairs (Taiwan) Democratic Justice Party (Korea) Democratic Labor Party (Korea) Democratic Progressive Party (Taiwan) Federation of Korean Trade Unions International Labor Organization Korea Central Intelligence Agency Korea Confederation of Trade Unions Kuomintang Party (Taiwan) Korea Tripartite Commission Labor Rights Association (Taiwan) Ministry of Economic Affairs (Taiwan) Ministry of Labor (Korea) Ministry of Planning and Budget (Korea) National Congress of Trade Unions (Korea) New Party (Taiwan) Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development People First Party (Taiwan) People’s Republic of China

xvi

ROC SMD SME SNTV SOE TCFI TCTU TIP TLF TSU WLAC

Abbreviations

Republic of China (Taiwan) single-member district small- and medium-size enterprise single nontransferable vote state-owned enterprise Taipei County Federation of Industrial Unions (Taiwan) Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions Taiwan Independence Party Taiwan Labor Front Taiwan Solidarity Union Workers’ Legislative Action Committee (Taiwan)

Notes on Names and References

Names of Korean and Taiwanese people and places are romanized. For people’s names in the text (except in the Acknowledgments), I follow the Korean and Chinese convention of listing the surnames first followed by the first names. For the romanization of Korean terms, I use the Korea Ministry of Education Guidelines, except for already established customs such as Rhee Syngman or Seoul. For Chinese terms, I use the Pinyin system, except for already established customs such as Chang Kai-shek or Kuomintang. Frequently appearing Korean and Chinese terms such as chaebol or dangwai are followed in their first appearance in the text by English translations in parentheses. Names of organizations and institutions in Korea and Taiwan are translated into English. The fully translated names are used in their first appearance in the text, followed by their abbreviations in parentheses. Abbreviations are used thereafter. The names of Korean and Taiwanese authors are romanized, using the spelling that appears in their publication. Because not all of the interviewees wanted their identities revealed, I use a special coding method when citing interviews as a reference source. The specific coding methods are explained in Appendix A. I provide the interviewee’s name and organizational affiliation only when I had the interviewee’s consent to do so.

Militants or Partisans

1

Introduction

The Puzzle: Scooters and Cars The scene that struck me most when I first arrived in Taipei in the spring of 2003 was of the streets filled with scooters. Young and old, men and women, humans and pets were riding these versatile vehicles. More surprisingly, there seemed to be few clashes between the scooter riders and car drivers, either in the form of physical bumping or in the sounds of yelling and swearing. This was quite a contrast to the street scenes with which I had been more familiar. The roads in Seoul are notoriously jammed with cars whose drivers are highly impatient, if not hostile, to smaller vehicles such as scooters and bikes. As a comparativist trying to figure out the origins of divergent labor politics in East Asian democracies, I found that these contrasting street scenes seemed to capture perfectly the different paths adopted by labor unions in Korea and Taiwan. Militant, radical, and confrontational have been the words associated with Korean labor, whereas terms such as partisan, moderate, and dependent have described Taiwanese unions. The basic puzzle that this study explores in these two Asian democracies is their types of labor politics, which are as distinctive as the streets in Seoul and Taipei: Why did these seemingly twin-like East Asian polities come to breed such different types of labor politics in their post-democratization decades? Indeed, Korea and Taiwan often team up as the most comparable pair in the imperfect world of small-number cross-national comparisons. ­Historically,

2

Introduction

both experienced Japanese colonialism during the first half of the twentieth century, followed by national division. Trapped within the Cold War political competition, authoritarian regimes in South Korea and Taiwan outlived the post-WWII decades under the tutelage of U.S. power. Dictators compensated for their legitimacy complex with export-oriented economic development, later to be described as the East Asian economic miracle. Along with the phenomenal industrialization and rising material affluence, a deprived working population and dissident intellectuals emerged to form the basis of a coalition to push the wheels for democratization in the late 1980s. Astounded by the exceptional abilities of Korea and Taiwan to combine high growth and liberal democracy in such a short and similar timetable, scholars researched and wrote much about the contours of these nations’ ­economic and political transformations.1 However, these analysts’ research agendas have often been bounded by the framework of the developmental state, government–business coordination, or elite-negotiated transitions. This study turns the spotlight onto somewhat unusual collective actors in East Asia—workers and unions—and asks what happened to them when they encountered the long-yearned-for democracy after decades of laborrepressive rule. Obviously, political democratization since 1987 has ushered in heightened labor mobilization and increased union organizing. Workers have demanded decent wages and improved working conditions. But even more desperate than these voices for material compensation was their desire for humane treatment and recognition as legitimate members of a democratic system. Yet the way in which union actors pursued their goals drastically differed and eventually diverged into two varieties of labor politics. Two decades of democratic strengthening in Korea have not stopped unionists from taking to the streets and frequently clashing with police forces. In contrast, union mobilization has become a seasonal event in Taiwan, and labor issues seem to have become integrated into the formal political processes, where politicians often campaign on labor-policy issues. This book’s main goal is to explain the origins, processes, and outcomes of this variety of labor politics in East Asian democracies. As the title suggests, this study questions why Korean unions are militants whereas Taiwanese unions are partisans. As militants, Korean unions continue to resort to confrontational mobilization, but Taiwanese unions, as partisans, seek moderate methods to implement their labor agenda through the political process. What are the historical origins and political processes that have produced this divergence? And eventually, what has organized labor gained through these varied collective efforts in labor-reform politics under democratic governments in

Introduction

3

the last twenty years? For our more general understanding of labor politics, is militancy a fair manifestation of union strength and efficacy that leads to greater policy gains, or are we missing some important alternative strategies and hidden paths for labor movements? Finally, how does the Korea–Taiwan comparison deepen our theoretical understanding of democracy, democratic representation, and labor politics in a more general sense? Whether labor militancy is enthusiastically applauded by leftist circles and antiglobalization activists or vehemently loathed by international investors and corporate managers, it represents more than the degree of union recalcitrance. Perhaps it tells more about democracy than we usually expect. If democratization is understood as a process of expanding the representation of previously excluded groups, labor militancy is a reflection of the identity of the insiders and outsiders of a democratic system. Frequent collective actions by workers on the shop floors or in the streets are an indication that they have found no organization to introduce their voice into the institutionalized ­political process. Moreover, strikes and demonstrations by unions are not without consequences, both political and economic. Insiders can affect the direction of policy formation and resource allocation, whereas outsiders cannot. The prolonged existence of disgruntled outsiders may result in an erosion of institutional stability and legitimacy. Also, volatility in labor relations often becomes a negative indicator of the national economy’s competitiveness and labor productivity, which could eventually worsen the bargaining conditions of labor. For these reasons, understanding labor militancy or its absence is more significant than labor militancy’s face value.

A Political Explanation: Labor Politics Is a Democratic Project Several explanations have been offered to account for union militancy in Korea versus union moderation in Taiwan. These accounts converge on emphasizing the importance of the structural differences between these two economies and the structural strengths that buttress the labor actors. Korea is recognized for the dominance of large conglomerates, known as chaebols, whereas Taiwan’s economy is notable for the vibrancy of a large number of small- and medium-size enterprises. So, the argument goes, Korean unions that were formed in the big chaebol companies are better organized and exert greater leverage than do their counterparts in Taiwan. Taiwanese unions are presumed to be handicapped by collective-action problems because of their dispersion into numerous small firms. Additionally, organized as decentralized enterprise unions, Korean labor is often criticized for its habit of engaging in

4

Introduction

militant mobilization to pursue its parochial interests at the cost of macronational consequences. These accounts tell bits and parts of the labor-movement story but obviously not the whole account. It is true that Korean unions are organized at the firm level, mostly berthed in large conglomerates. Yet Taiwanese unions are the same. A close examination of the structural and organizational conditions that undergird labor unions in these two democracies, as this study will show, reveals that they share more similarities than differences. Regardless of the macro-structural differences, unions in both Korea and Taiwan are primarily­ organized in large firms, maintain a decentralized enterprise union structure with a similar level of unionization rates, and are equally divided into two national centers, one conservative and the other progressive. Therefore, the ­questions about why these union actors with so many similarities in their structural and organizational features have chosen different modes of mobilization to achieve their goals under democratic politics have remained unanswered. To account for these differences in labor politics, this study builds upon the theoretical tradition that has viewed unions as political actors that constantly interact and negotiate with the political conditions in which they are situated (Lipset 1983; Collier and Collier 1991; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; Collier 1999; Bartolini 2007). This approach is a clear departure from an economic perspective that interprets labor unions primarily as the embodiment of economic interests tied to their place within the economic structure (Rogowski 1989; Pontusson 1992; Hall and Soskice 2001). This economic perspective dismisses the significance of labor unions’ historical and political experiences and consequently errs by assuming that unions represent an intrinsic, essentialist labor interest. As collective actors develop their preferences and interests based on their position within the socioeconomic structure, they are concurrently shaped by given historical and political ­experiences. When we think of working-class mobilizations in early-twentieth-­century Europe, for instance, their interest in economic enhancement was closely tied to their political demand for universal enfranchisement (Bartolini 2007). However, workers’ protest in the third-wave democratization differed from earlier mobilizations depending on how workers saw their interests being infringed by authoritarian regimes (Seidman 1994; Collier 1999; Bellin 2000; Candland and Sil 2001). For South African workers, labor subjugation, racial apartheid, and authoritarian politics overtly coincided, whereas labor ­privileges and political democratization were separate goals for Mexican workers with prolonged experience of state dependency. Moreover, for these

Introduction

5

distinctive interests to be manifested into “labor movements,” workers have to overcome collective action problems and engage in strategic interactions with other collective actors, which are conditioned by specific institutional opportunities and constraints. In short, labor’s interests and actions cannot be fully understood without a systematic analysis of politics. Politics here is understood as political institutions, relationships with other political actors, and political experiences that offer varying possibilities and limitations to organized labor. The importance of politics is more pronounced when the focus of research is workers and unions in a polity transitioning from authoritarianism into democracy. Under such transformative circumstances, labor politics becomes a democratic project where workers and unions are fully immersed in contestation and negotiation for greater representation and influence by exploring the opportunities under the political institutions in flux. Students of labor need to go further from a structuralist argument to disentangle these political interactions and processes that condition the molding of labor into collective actors. Without disclosing the interactions between union actors and their political environment, we may not be able to fully grasp the causal paths that lead to the national variations of labor activism. To account for the evolution of different patterns of labor politics in ­Korea and Taiwan, I build my explanation by connecting authoritarian legacies, political coalitions under democratic politics, and the modes of labor ­mobilization. Authoritarian legacies are known to leave lasting imprints on the development of political parties (Mainwaring 1999; Geddes and Franz 2007), civil society (Kubicek 2004; Bernhard and Karakoc 2007), and labor actors (Collier and Collier 1991; Buchanan 1995; Kubicek 1999; Pollert 2000; Robertson 2004; Crowley 2004; Cook 2007; Caraway 2008). However, ­authoritarians come in various shapes and adopt different control strategies vis-à-vis their political opposition. For authoritarian legacies, I focus on how strategies of incorporation or exclusion employed by dictators affected the interests and capacities of political challengers. Oppositional actors more exposed to incorporation and formal politics are more likely to be expected to learn to moderate their demands and tactics than are those who are mostly excluded under authoritarian rule. In understanding the development of labor politics, the formation of a democratic coalition under authoritarian rule is also of critical importance. Whether this coalition includes labor or not and whether this coalition is led by an opposition party (or parties) or social-movement groups can ­significantly affect labor’s position during democratic transition and beyond. Here the role

6

Introduction

of ­political parties is crucial. It has been one of the few reaffirmed claims in comparative politics that partisan coalitions between labor unions and political parties (left, populist, or otherwise) have been instrumental in harnessing labor militancy and instituting pro-labor policies (Garrett and Lange 1989; Levitsky and Way 1998; Murillo 2001; Tafel and Boniface 2003; Etchemendy 2004; Burgess 2004). Because partisan allies are able to provide access to labor policy making and channel material rewards to organized labor, unions with partisan allies are more likely to pursue institutionalized methods of interest articulation under democratic governments. However, if union actors have no political agent to take their voices into the formal political process, they tend to continue to resort to outsider tactics—for example, militant mobilization. As Lipset argued years ago, labor militancy is a proxy for unions’ frustration that originates from their exclusion from the formal political process (1983). It is thus critical to investigate who labor’s friends are and whether these coalition partners can provide unions with meaningful access to institutionalized politics. These political experiences of the past and present offer different possibilities for and limits on unions’ mobilization strategies, which this study conceptualizes as militant unionism (independent unions engaging in frequent strikes and street rallies that often involve confrontation with lawenforcement authorities) versus partisan unionism (party-dependent unions ­employing moderated small-scale collective actions aimed at pressuring and lobbying within legal limits). Historical legacies of exclusion and the subsequent absence of partisan representation produce militant unions. Yet this heightened militancy is expected to be less successful in labor-reform politics under democratic governments because of unions’ lack of partisan allies who can offer policy influence within the government. Partisan unions, although less dramatic in street politics, might be able to garner policy concessions with their ties to political parties within institutional politics. These theoretical expectations are confirmed by the Korea–Taiwan comparison. I argue that the continued militancy of Korean unions originates from authoritarian exclusion and the absence of political parties to represent labor interests in democratic politics. Korea’s military dictators sought collusive alliance with large capitalists and their hometown cliques while using a strategy of blatant exclusion to tightly contain labor mobilization and political opposition. Limited opportunities for electoral contestation and the high costs associated with political dissent against dictators divided political opposition into party-oriented and movement-oriented groups, with the latter becoming better organized and more influential. Unions were further limited by authoritarian laws that prohibited unions’ political activities in addition

Introduction

7

to restricting union organizing. These exclusionary control strategies by the Korean developmental state not only radicalized political dissenters but also brought workers and oppositional groups together. Therefore, Korean workers with little experience in resolving labor grievances within institutional channels came to project a radical vision of labor politics, both in their interests and in their modes of mobilization. Even under democratic rule (since 1987), Korean unions have remained as electoral outsiders. Korean political parties, largely organized along regional divisions, have failed to develop into representative organizations able to mediate labor interests into institutional politics. These political configurations reinforced the established norm of union-centered militant mobilization and drove union actors out of the formal political processes. As unions found no mediating political forces to articulate their interests, labor-reform politics became highly confrontational and futilely protracted. Although unions’ mobilization capacities were instrumental in raising wages and benefits at the firm level (where unions are organized), the lack of partisan allies to channel labor interest into formal politics limited the unions’ effectiveness in national policy changes involving such issues as union rights, workweek reduction, and anti-privatization campaigns. Unions clashed with the democratic governments, which introduced neoliberal measures aimed at undermining the structural and organizational basis of labor unions but having little actual efficacy in altering the course of change. Despite the dramatic scenes of factory occupations and street demonstrations over the last twenty years, Korean unions raise a fundamental question of whether union militancy is a fair representation of union strength. Labor politics in Taiwan offers a different story. Taiwan’s Kuomintang (KMT) regime was a minority émigré regime and, as such, had to design control strategies that would minimize the political revolt by the majority Taiwanese. Its solution was to create a dualistic system in the economic and political arena. The KMT placed the large public enterprises under its control while leaving small businesses in the hands of Taiwanese entrepreneurs. In the political realm, it allowed local elections as a way of incorporating native elites while tightly controlling the electoral space at the national level. As part of such dualistic control, the KMT placed greater emphasis on the incorporation of unions than did Korean dictators and encouraged union organizing among the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). At the same time, the electoral space at the local level provided the political opposition (first called dangwai and later organized into the Democratic Progressive Party, the DPP) with opportunities to advance into formal politics, prompting the anti-KMT,

8

Introduction

pro-democracy forces to be organized under the leadership of an opposition party. Therefore, under the partial incorporation of labor into the KMT regime, the majority of Taiwanese workers began to perceive labor grievances as ethnic-justice issues that could be represented by an opposition party. For unions in Taiwan, therefore, political means that prioritize partisan reliance were not to be rejected, as was the case for Korean unions, but were to be highlighted and exploited as an important channel to enhance labor interests. Taiwan’s democratization since the late 1980s has magnified the opportunities for union actors as political parties have consolidated as stable but highly competitive organizations at various levels of electoral contestation. The competition between the KMT and the DPP not only emboldened the leverage of labor unions but also reaffirmed party-dependent union movements. Organized labor, induced into formal political processes, sought to enhance its interests through political maneuvering. Such strategies proved to be effective for Taiwanese unions in securing policy concessions in national labor reforms, but not quite so effective in their firm-level wage demands, which require mobilizational strength vis-à-vis their employers. Although Taiwanese unions have played it smart by taking advantage of the available political resources and have gained some policy influence through their partisan allies, it is also possible that this continued dependency and the unions’ weakening protest capacities will test the sustained loyalty of their political partners. In essence, this study offers a political account of the relationship between labor and democracy by highlighting how labor interests are mediated by political parties into the formal political process. Because democracy is a system that purports to provide representation and inclusion of previously excluded social members, labor activism in nascent democracies such as Korea and Taiwan cannot be explained in a satisfactory way without examining labor’s place within democratic institutions. This study places special emphasis on political parties in analyzing labor politics under democratic governments. Because political parties are the primary agents that provide representation and policy influence in representative democracies, having a partisan ally is of crucial importance for organized labor to become a political insider with access to resource-allocation institutions. For unions that are denied such ­democratic channels, streets become the venue in which to raise their voices. Continued labor militancy and unstable labor relations are thus reflections of party failures and democratic imperfections. Therefore, the saying that this study reasserts is “No political representation, no labor peace!” To return to the opening analogy of cars and scooters, the street scenes in Seoul and Taipei resemble the political paths offered to union actors in Korea

Introduction

9

and Taiwan. Korean unions are required to block the roads or drive cars (the political party) themselves because the existing cars have failed to take them to their desired destination. In contrast, unions in Taiwan are riding scooters (the unions) and are able to travel with the help of existing cars that have been accommodating to lesser vehicles. Expect lousy streets in Seoul with sudden stoppages and clashes. In Taipei, anticipate less dramatic street scenes.

Methods of Inquiry: Comparisons, Processes, and Causal Paths This study employs a case study method because explaining the origins and development of divergent labor politics requires thick analyses and nuanced process tracing, which are attainable only through qualitative case studies. Case studies allow researchers to gain in-depth knowledge of cases and grounded insights about causal processes. By engaging in these qualitative investigations, we are able to identify reasons for the emergence of a particular decision through a sequence of events (Munck 2004; McKeown 2004; Tarrow 2004). In short, this method enables “assessing whether and how a variable mattered to the outcome [rather] than how much it mattered” (George and Bennett 2005, 25: emphasis original). The political account of labor activism offered in this book builds upon a comparative case study.2 It is comparative not only because it compares Korea and Taiwan but also because it places these two cases in a broader comparative picture of labor politics in old and new democracies. The arguments presented in this study are informed by and compared with the theoretical claims generated from empirical studies of a larger set of countries. Also, the cases compared in this study are not just two countries. Whereas Chapters 2, 3, and 4 offer a broad cross-national comparison between Korea and Taiwan, Chapter  5 delves into subnational comparisons of four laborreform episodes that were most salient and highly contested in their postdemocratization decades. The empirical examination is expanded to eight cases to more closely follow the causal paths of how the political party–union linkage, or its absence, shaped unions’ modes of mobilization in pursuing their interests in these labor-reform episodes. This comparative case study is based on information collected through my field research in Korea and Taiwan, which involved multiple trips over eight years (2000 –2008).3 I searched for information through a combination of several methodologies: (1) structured, in-depth interviews with unionists, labor activists, government bureaucrats, party politicians, and labor scholars; (2) labor, economy, and legislative data generated by government agencies

10

Introduction

and other research institutes; (3) various printed or online materials distributed by labor-related groups; and (4) participatory observations in various union activities that ranged from small meetings and workshops to the annual congress of national confederations and labor protests in the streets. I have drawn on all the sources gathered during my fieldwork, but I consider my interviews to be the crux of the empirical evidence in this research. I talked to more than one hundred people related to labor, sometimes at length and on multiple occasions. Detailed information about the interview logistics and the interviewee profiles appears in Appendix A. These interviews are obviously not intended to offer statistical confirmation or disconfirmation of the claims I offer in this study, but to give voices to the workers and unionists in terms of how they perceive, interpret, and assess their movements, allies, and the political context that surrounds them. The stories of their “lived experiences” (Thompson 1963) helped me clarify research questions, understand the complexities involved in the processes of labor politics, and formulate nuanced causal explanations of this comparative study. Without the knowledge and insights I gained from these interviews, I would have constructed a quite different argument, which perhaps would have made no sense at all.

Outline of the Book Following this introduction, Chapter 2 presents the puzzle of the variety of East Asian labor politics in detail by placing these cases in a broader context of labor militancy. It discusses how existing scholarship has approached and explained labor politics both in advanced and developing democracies. This critical examination revolves around two approaches: economic/structural and organizational. Along with this exposition, this chapter presents comparative data on the structural features of the Korean and Taiwanese economies as well as on the organizational profiles of labor unions. After discussing why and how structural or organizational arguments cannot offer a satisfying explanation for the divergent paths of labor politics in Korea and Taiwan, this chapter offers a political explanation by focusing on the effects of authoritarian legacies and partisan coalitions that have critically molded the interests, capacities, and strategies of labor unions under democratic governments. Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of the historical legacies of authoritarian labor control to establish an understanding of the initial conditions of union actors at the time of democratization. It examines how authoritarian control strategies shaped labor’s interests, perceptions, and capacities in pre-

Introduction

11

democratization decades. It discusses the relationships formed between labor unions and other collective actors (pro-democracy movements and opposition parties) and how these political coalitions influenced the development of newly emerging labor movements. The chapter proceeds to describe the political dynamics in Korea and Taiwan that culminated in their democratic transition in 1987. The discussion is focused on illuminating how the electoral space and political parties have provided diverging possibilities and limitations for labor politics in these two Asian democracies. Chapter 4 is dedicated to analyzing the varying relationships formed between labor unions and political parties in the post-transition period. It shows how the degree of political party institutionalization and the nature of political divisions shaped political party–union linkages. Through a close examination of lawmakers’ career profiles in the national legislature and workers’ voting patterns in the last two decades, this chapter illustrates effective party– union linkages in Taiwan versus the absence of such linkages in Korea. It highlights the role of political parties in mediating social conflict, particularly in channeling workers’ grievances into formal political processes. Chapter 5 examines the processes and outcomes of labor-reform politics that occurred under democratic governments in Korea and Taiwan. Four labor-policy areas that have been most salient and highly contested in the post-democratization decades are identified and analyzed: labor-rights recognition, wage determination, workweek reductions, and job protection/­ antiprivatization. These four areas of labor contestation reveal how union activism under democratic governments involved contrasting processes and produced divergent labor-reform 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 on 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 in companylevel gains, where the actions of individual unions weigh more heavily and exert greater influence. Chapter 6 is the study’s conclusion. It starts by sharing the epistemological motivations that prompted this study on labor politics in East Asian democracies and proceeds to summarize its key arguments and findings. The chapter also discusses the new insights and broader implications that this research brings to the larger literature on democracy and labor. It ends by identifying the continued significance of studying labor for our better understanding of democratic politics amid the changing economic context.

2

Labor Politics Realities, Theories, and Explanations

Whether they like it or not, unions became political institutions. . . . Seymour Martin Lipset, Radicalism or Reformism

In this chapter I present the puzzle of variant labor politics in Korea and ­Taiwan—why Korea has militant unions whereas Taiwan has partisan unions—by placing them in a broader comparative context. In searching for answers to this research question, I first discuss how existing scholarship has approached and explained labor politics both in advanced and developing democracies. This discussion is intended to serve two purposes. The first aim is to introduce a library of labor-politics studies to those who are new to the literature and to share the basic tenets of existing theoretical debates. The second purpose is to properly locate my proposed explanation of Asian labor politics in terms of existing theoretical approaches. In so doing, I underscore the importance of taking a political perspective, in addition to economic– structural and organizational approaches, to gain a more meaningful understanding of the origins and processes of diverse labor activism in East Asian democracies. The central contention of this research is the importance of politics, past and present, in understanding union mobilization. Labor politics is a matter of a democratic project where union actors seek representation and influence. As such, authoritarian legacies and the specific configurations of democratic institutions critically shape unions’ mode of interest articulation and their achievements in labor-reform politics. Although economic–structural and organizational characteristics of unions constitute important conditions in determining their interests and capacities for collective mobilization, this potential is materialized in interaction with the opportunities and constraints

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found in the unfolding political context. This research asserts the importance of democratic institutions, especially political parties, and the extent of democratic representation of labor interests in the making of national variations of union activism. Labor’s representation and inclusion through partisan allies moderate the mode of labor activism by guiding unions to address the labor agenda through institutionalized political processes. Unions alienated from political institutions and partisan allies are more likely to pursue radical mobilization strategies. Consequently, unions’ varying modes of mobilization affect what they can gain in labor-reform politics under democratic ­governments.

Labor Politics and Labor Militancy Labor politics in this study is understood as various modes of collective action taken by workers and their organizations to influence the policy-making process at the level of the shop floor, industry, and the economy as a whole. These collective actions can take different forms. For instance, Fred Deyo suggests four different modalities of labor politics: union-based, populist, social-movement-oriented, and social-disorder-aiming actions (2007). In any polity we may observe all of these modalities of labor politics taking place but each with varying frequencies, intensities, and combinations. In Korea and Taiwan, as well, we see workers and unions engaging in these different forms of labor activism, but certain modes are more prevalent than others. If national-level labor politics can be characterized by the dominance of one type of labor activism, Korean labor engages in union-based, disruptive mobilization at a greater frequency and intensity than Taiwanese labor, which pursues moderate and law-abiding tactics. In a simplified continuum where militant labor politics is on the left end and accommodating labor politics on the right end, Korean unions are on the far left whereas Taiwanese unions are on the far right. In this study, this variation is conceptualized as militant unionism (independent unions engaging in frequent strikes and street rallies that often involve confrontation with law-enforcement authorities) versus partisan unionism (party-dependent unions employing moderated small-scale collective actions aimed at pressuring and lobbying within legal limits). Labor militancy is the most commonly used measurement of union behavior and refers to organized protests disrupting production or governance. To compare and understand the empirical realities of labor politics, I first use a typical measure of labor militancy—workdays lost because of labor disputes per 1,000 employees (see Figure 2.1). This is calculated by dividing the

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14

1987–1996

1997–2007

3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0 Korea figure

Taiwan

Japan

Germany

United States

2.1  Workdays lost because of labor disputes (  per 1,000 employees)

s o u rc e :

“LABORSTA,” International Labour Organization, accessed on January 15, 2006.

­ umber of labor disputes by the number of paid employees. To place Korea n and Taiwan in a more comparative context, I include Germany, Japan, and the United States. The first bar represents the accumulated number of workdays lost for the period of 1987–1996 and the second bar for 1997–2007. Because each country uses a slightly different definition of what constitutes a labor dispute, these data are not completely comparable.1 Yet, despite the discrepancy in the data, it is obvious that Korean workers have engaged in militant activism much more frequently than have workers in other nations in the last two decades. In a closer comparison of Korea and Taiwan, Korean workers have been highly disruptive compared to their counterparts in Taiwan even after considering the different measurement of labor disputes in each county. Here the number of workers involved in labor disputes and workdays lost due to labor disputes are compared (Figure 2.2 and Figure 2.3), instead of the number of disputes.2 This is because the Korea Ministry of Labor counts labor disputes that involve a stoppage of operation at the shop floor, whereas the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs includes any type of collective action taken by workers. As such, these data record a much smaller number of disputes for Korea than for Taiwan and make the numerical comparison almost meaningless. For instance, the total number of labor disputes in Korea from 1989 to 2007 is only 5,379, whereas for Taiwan the number mounts to 134,372.

Labor Politics

Korea

15

Taiwan

450,000 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

2.2  Number of workers involved in labor disputes in Korea and Taiwan, 1989 –2007

figure

s o u r c e s : Data from the Korea Ministry of Labor and the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, accessed on November 15, 2008.

As Figure 2.2 and Figure 2.3 show, both the number of workers involved in labor disputes and workdays lost because of labor disputes attest to a higher level of labor militancy in Korea than in Taiwan. On annual average, more than 130,000 workers participate in labor disputes that bring actual stoppage to factory operation in Korea, whereas about 54,000 workers join any form of labor protest in Taiwan. The comparison of workdays lost because of labor disputes, in particular, reveals the real difference between these two democracies. Workdays lost are almost insignificant in Taiwan, whereas the high number of lost days in Korea implies an actual halt of production lines (see Figure 2.3). The annual average of workdays lost per 1,000 employees from 1989 to 2007 is much different between the two nations, with 191.6 for Korea and 0.8 for Taiwan. We may suspect that drastic social changes such as political democratization or economic crisis would critically affect workers’ propensity for strikes. True, a high level of labor activism is observed in Korea’s early years of democratic transition, when most of the labor disputes were spontaneous ­mobilizations by workers with grievances over inhumane working conditions, low wages, and the denial of union rights.3 But no such dramatic rise

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Korea

Taiwan

7,000,000

6,000,000

5,000,000

4,000,000

3,000,000

2,000,000

1,000,000

0 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

figure

2.3  Workdays lost because of labor disputes in Korea and Taiwan, 1989 –2007

s o u rc e s :

Data from the Korea Ministry of Labor and the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, accessed on November 15, 2008.

or decline is observable in Taiwan’s data. Additionally, when economies turn downward and labor markets shrink, workers tend to refrain from disruptive activities. Both Figure 2.2 and Figure 2.3 show a low point of labor disputes in 1997 for Korea, when its economy was severely affected by the Asian financial crisis. However, disputes soon regained vibrancy in the post-1998 period. An economic recession came a few years later (in 2000) to Taiwan, and a decline of labor mobilization is marginally evident in the number of involved workers (Figure 2.2) but not in days lost because of disputes (Figure 2.3). Hence, even after these political and market effects are considered, labor militancy at the aggregate level remains consistently higher in Korea than in Taiwan. Therefore, why and how did these two East Asian democracies that had once been characterized as developmental states with effective labor-­control strategies come to breed such different types of labor politics? Why are ­Korean unions called militant, radical, and confrontational, when terms such as partisan, moderate, and dependent are used for Taiwanese unions? More importantly, if democratic politics is meant to resolve political conflicts over the distribution of resources, why did the two decades of democratic experiment in Korea and Taiwan offer such varying degrees of labor incorporation? On a

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practical ground, what have unions achieved through these divergent modes of labor politics under democratic governments? Is militancy a fair manifestation of union strength that leads to greater policy gains, or are we missing some important alternative strategies for labor unions? Although labor politics in East Asia has not been the most popular research topic in either political science or regional studies, theories and arguments generated from a broader literature on labor can be a starting point in searching for explanations for divergent labor politics in Korea and Taiwan. Existing studies have often placed emphasis on the economic structural conditions and unions’ organizational features as critical conditions that shape labor interests and capacities for collective action. Let’s examine these arguments.

The Economic Structural Explanation In the political economy literature, where labor is usually studied, structural conditions are highlighted as determinants of workers’ capacities and policy preferences. More broadly, structural analyses assume that the interests and strengths of the actors involved in industrial relations, such as workers, employers, and the state, can be deduced from their structural position in the national economy. Workers in the manufacturing sector and in competitive industries are expected to be better organized and exert greater leverage than workers in the service sector or in declining industries. Earlier works on European labor took this theoretical perspective and showed how organized labor based in different sectors bargained for public policies (Korpi and Shalev 1979; Rogowski 1989; Pontusson 1992; Pontusson 1993; Pontusson and Swenson 1996). More-recent studies on the “variety of capitalism” also take a similar approach in explaining the behavioral logic of employers and unions in advanced industrial economies (King and Wood 1999; Hall and Soskice 2001; Thelen 2001). Depending on where the employers and workers are located within the sectoral divides, it is argued, these actors pursue differentiated interests that produce divergent outcomes in the labor-market deregulation process (Thelen 2001). Scholars who examine East Asian economies as their empirical cases have also adopted this theoretical lens to explain patterns of labor relations (Deyo 1989; Castells 1992; Deyo 1997; Orru, Woolsey Biggart, and Hamilton 1997). In particular, a division between large conglomerates and small- and ­medium-size enterprises (SMEs) has been a popular description of East Asian capitalism. Big business groups such as keiretsu and chaebol4 are known to dominate Japan and Korea, respectively, whereas SMEs are more prevalent in

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ta b l e

2.1

Basic economic indicators: Korea and Taiwan korea Year

Population

Labor Force

GDP/Capita

Average Inflation (1987–2007)

1987 2007

41.6 m 48.4 m

16.4 m 23.4 m

  $2,190 $25,000

4.6%

taiwan Year

Population

Labor Force

GDP/Capita

Average Inflation (1987–2007)

1987 2007

19.6 m 22.9 m

  8.2 m 10.3 m

  $5,298 $30,100

1.9%

s o u r c e s : Data from the Korean Statistical Information Service and the National Statistics of Taiwan, accessed on November 15, 2008. n o t e : GDP per capita in PPP (purchasing power parity).

Taiwan. These differences regarding capital concentration and dispersion are viewed as contributing to the varying degrees of union organizing and worker militancy (Kim 1993; Shin 1994; Orru, Woolsey Biggart, and Hamilton 1997; Chu 1996; Kume 1998; Huang 1999). The argument goes that workers in large, heavy-industry companies concentrated in industrial parks have better capabilities to organize unions and to engage in confrontational strategies than do workers who are dispersed throughout numerous small firms. Small firms are seen as difficult places to build working-class identity, organize collective actions, and command national influence. Unions in Japan and Korea would belong to the first group and Taiwanese unions to the second group. If we follow the reasoning of this structural approach, the economic structure of Korea and that of Taiwan should be sufficiently different from each other as to breed labor unions with varying interests and capacities. I examine these conditions below to critically reevaluate the conglomerate-versussmall-firm dichotomy that has been a widely accepted way to explain the difference between Korea and Taiwan. Because the focus of this study is on the two decades following the democratic transition in 1987, Table 2.1 presents several basic indicators of these two economies for the period of 1987–2007. Table 2.2 summarizes the changing composition of the labor force during the same time frame.5 In terms of population and labor force, Korea is about twice the size of Taiwan. Following a common trend observed in developed capitalist economies, both Korea and Taiwan underwent declines in their agricultural and industrial sectors along with expansions of the service sectors over the last two decades. The proportion and growth rate of the labor force employed

Labor Politics ta b l e

19

2.2

Labor-force composition by industry (in thousands and by percentage) korea Year

Total

1987 2007

16,354 23,433

Year

Total

1987 2007

  8,022 10,294

Agriculture/Forestry/Fishery 3,580 (21.9) 1,726 (7.3)

Mine/Industry 4,602 (28.1) 4,137 (17.7)

Service 8,172 (50) 17,569 (75)

taiwan Agriculture/Forestry/Fishery 1,226 (15.3) 543 (5.3)

Mine/Industry

Service

3,431 (42.8) 3,788 (36.8)

3,366 (42) 5,962 (57.9)

s o u r c e s : Data from the Korean Statistical Information Service and the National Statistics of Taiwan, accessed on November 15, 2008.

in the service sector are more spectacular in Korea than in Taiwan. Employment in the industrial sector, the sector often regarded as the primary base of union organizing, is much smaller in Korea (17.7 percent) compared to Taiwan (36.8 percent). This difference is associated with the structural shock of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, which severely impaired the Korean economy but did not affect the Taiwanese economy to the same degree. Many of the Korean employees who lost their jobs in manufacturing firms during this period entered the service sector by starting up their own small businesses such as street vending or service-related stores (Yun 2009). The Taiwanese economy has shown a less dramatic growth in the service sector because its industrial sector was already flexible enough to absorb the market vicissitudes associated with global economic changes (Kong 2006). The data on the labor-force composition of these two economies have led to an interesting question regarding the relationship between the industrial structure and union organizing. Structuralist scholars have argued that a key feature that differentiates these two economies is the size of the firm and that this structural difference is accountable for the varying modes of union mobilization in these two nations. But is such a “chaebol versus SME” contrast grounded in factual reality? Various economic data, as presented in Table 2.3, do not exactly support this myth, which has often characterized the Korean and Taiwanese economies in terms of firm size. Although Korea and Taiwan do not use identical definitions of SMEs,6 the predominant notion that these two economies have drastically different industrial structures in terms of shares of SMEs seems to have been exaggerated (APEC 2002; Hall and Harvie 2003; see also Wade 1990, 66 –70). In the first place, there was no significant gap in the share of SMEs as of the early 1980s

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ta b l e

2.3

SMEs in Korea and Taiwan (by percentage) korean smes*

taiwanese smes

Year

Number

Employees

Sales

Number

Employees

Sales

1981 1991 1997 2002

96.6 98.3 99.1 99.8

49.6 61.7 69.3 86.7

31.9 42.7 46.3 50.8

99.1 97.0 97.8 98.1

61 78.56 78.43 78.1

n.a. 34.3 32.1 29.0

s o u r c e s : Data from the Korea Federation of Small and Medium Business and the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs, accessed on February 1, 2006. n o t e s : Number of SMEs as percentage of all firms; employees in nonagricultural SMEs as percentage of total employment; sales of SMEs as percentage of total sales by all firms. *The Korean definition of an SME was changed in 1997 from firms that employ 30 –299 workers to firms that employ 10 –299 workers.

(around 50 percent in Korea and 60 percent in Taiwan). SMEs have played a similarly important role in both economies since 1990 by composing over 95 percent of enterprises and providing about 80 percent of the employment opportunities, as they do in most other economies (APEC 2002; Hall and Harvie 2003). Interestingly, in recent years SMEs have employed more people and contributed more to overall economic output in Korea (86.7 percent) than in Taiwan (78.1 percent). The drastic increase in Korea’s SME employment, from 70 percent in 1997 to 87 percent in 2002, seems to be the result of the economic structuring precipitated by the Asian financial crisis in 1997–1998. These discussions lead us to conclude that fewer structural disparities exist between these two economies than many have assumed. This is not to deny the relative differences found within Korean and Taiwanese economic structures, particularly the role played by the chaebols in the Korean economy, but rather to confirm the relatively common structural basis for union organizing. Regarding the relationship between industrial structures and union organizing, unions in both economies have been organized within large firms while leaving most of the SMEs unorganized. In Korea the majority of the regular workforce employed in large enterprises became unionized by the late 1990s, with the notable exception of Samsung.7 According to a study conducted by the Korea Ministry of Labor (2004), workers employed in firms with more than 300 workers (non-SMEs by the Korean standard) accounted for 71.8 percent of total union membership in 1993 and even increased to 76.4 percent in 2003. If the indicator is changed to see the unionization rates in firms with different employment sizes, 70 percent of firms with more than 500 workers and almost all firms with more than 1,000 workers are unionized, whereas very few firms with fewer than 50 workers have unions at all (ibid.).

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The same can be said for Taiwan, where large firms form the backbone of labor unions. Unionized firms are mostly large enterprises that are, or formerly were, state-owned enterprises (SOEs).8 Taiwan’s Council of Labor Affairs (CLA, the equivalent to a national labor ministry) does not provide time-series­ union-density data by firm size. Instead, two alternative sources confirm that Taiwanese unions are dominantly organized in large firms only. One study conducted by a Taiwanese scholar has also found that the size of the workplace is the most powerful factor in determining whether a worker is unionized or not, while the effects of all other demographic factors are minimal (Lee 1994). My interviews with labor-ministry bureaucrats and union activists suggest that the situation of organized unions in Taiwan is not different from those in Korea. In refuting an automatic correlation between economic structure and union organizing, it is important to note how political logic has interfered, especially with direct state intervention in labor relations. Korean unions began to be formed in small manufacturing firms when industrialization expanded with the implementation of export-oriented policies. With Park Chung Hee’s decision to move the economy into heavy industrialization in the 1970s, firm size swelled and industrial concentration intensified. Yet union organizing was restricted, and industrial relations remained despotic under authoritarian regimes. Workers who got organized and mobilized in the 1970s against inhumane working conditions were women workers in SMEs (Koo 2001). It was only in the late 1980s, when the political environment was democratized, that unions in large, heavy industries emerged as the backbone of Korea’s labor movement. Another factor that contributed to the union concentration in large firms is associated with the growth of unions in nonmanufacturing industries after democratization in the white-collar sectors, such as banking, transportation, hospital, and mass media, that usually have a large number of employees. The story of why most unions in Taiwan are found within large SOEs also involves the state’s political motivations rather than an economic structural logic. First, when the KMT regime retreated to the island of Taiwan in 1949 and launched development plans in the 1950s, it was hesitant to promote large private enterprises. The émigré regime did not want to overpower the local Taiwanese entrepreneurs, who already constituted the majority of the country’s businessmen (Chu 1989). The KMT and its mainlander followers intended to maintain their monopoly of political power and to preempt the potential growth of economic power by the local Taiwanese. As soon as the KMT was transplanted to post-1945 Taiwan, it first seized the large enterprises (such as the railway system, banks, and agricultural and

22

Labor Politics

industrial firms) previously owned by the Japanese occupation government. In the following decades the regime established more SOEs in heavy industries, shipbuilding, and petroleum production while leaving the small private industries to Taiwanese entrepreneurs. The KMT regime wanted to place key, large industries under its political grip in the form of SOEs. These SOEs came to dominate the industries that produce intermediary products for the domestic market and the sectors that provide goods and services to private firms engaged in exports.9 Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan Power, China Petroleum (the “Big Three”), China Steel, China Shipbuilding, Chunghwa Petrochemical, and Taiwan Machinery have been the most prominent SOEs in Taiwan. Another political account of the unions’ predominance in SOEs is related to the KMT’s handicapped position regarding the local Taiwanese as well as in its diplomatic front. On the one hand, the KMT government “encouraged” union organizing in large SOEs as a way of labor control and incorporating native workers. On the other hand, when the United States switched its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in the 1970s, Taiwan’s status in the international arena deteriorated badly. In its efforts to improve Taiwan’s foreign relations and promote its “democratic” image, the KMT promoted union organizing among the SOEs (Lee 1988). Union organizing in small firms was legally restricted, for the Trade Union Law allowed unions only in firms employing more than thirty workers. Therefore, unions in large SOEs were formed under the tutelage of the authoritarian regime and often functioned as the administrative arms of the KMT government. A critical examination of the structural conditions that undergird unions in Korea and Taiwan reveals that they share more similarities than differences. The dichotomy between large conglomerates and SMES, in particular, turns out to be exaggerated. A careful scrutiny of union data confirms that unions are indeed predominantly organized in large enterprises not only in Korea but in both countries. However, this has been more the result of the state’s direct intervention in union organizing rather than a natural process of union formation following the expansion of industrialization.

Structural Changes in the Labor Market Since the Asian Financial Crisis The dynamic economic growth of Korea and Taiwan since the 1960s has largely depended on export manufacturing, which made both of the econo-

Labor Politics

23

mies tightly integrated into the global market. From the 1990s, governments and businesses in these two nations were placed under growing pressures for structural reforms as neoliberal doctrine became a dominant ideology and the process of economic globalization intensified. The Asian financial crisis, in particular, accelerated the pace of economic liberalization, with significant consequences for the labor market. The Korean economy was one of the protagonists of this crisis and as such underwent drastic structural changes, which accompanied serious consequences for its labor market. Although Taiwan was saved from the direct hit of this crisis, its economy suffered serious recession in 2000 –2001 and had to accelerate economic reforms. These changes included a shrinking manufacturing sector, increasing flexibility (or insecurity) in the labor market, and the privatization of public enterprises. As discussed earlier in this chapter, manufacturing began to shrink while service sectors expanded. This sectoral change was not just a result of shifting the growth focus from traditional manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy, but also of the relocation of manufacturing facilities to China and elsewhere in search of cheap labor and lax regulations. For instance, the volume of the Korean economy’s overseas investment increased from $7 billion (or 1,818 cases10) to $18.5 billion (or 5,250 cases) over the last decade (1996 –2006) (Korea Statistical Information Service 2009). A similar upsurge of outgoing investment is observed with the Taiwanese economy, where the capital that flew to mainland China alone rose from $1.2 billion (or 383 cases) to $10 billion (or 996 cases) in the last decade (Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs 2009). Such a rapid increase of business relocation and capital investment to mainland China has been an issue of particular concern for labor unions because the hollowing out of industrial manufacturing has undermined their organizational basis. Another serious predicament faced by labor was the increasing flexibility and insecurity in the labor market. Many companies have drastically decreased or halted new recruitments for full-time employees with secure labor contracts as a firm strategy to reduce labor costs and to increase employment flexibility (Yun 2009). Even with existing regular jobs, firms often substituted them with contingent workers with precarious labor conditions. With employers’ insistence on greater flexibility in allocating and deploying labor, the government introduced or changed labor policies to make the labor market more flexible but highly insecure for the working people. Contingent labor, which comes in many different names, such as irregular, temporary, parttime, and dispatch workers, has dramatically increased in recent years. The privatization of SOEs was also part of this restructuring process, which usually involved cuts in existing employment.

24

Labor Politics

Since 1999, irregular workers have accounted for over half of Korea’s paid labor force (Kim 2007). In 2007, they accounted for 55.8 percent of the total wage employees (ibid.). Because of a rapid increase in irregular workers, particularly since the Asian financial crisis, contingent employment has emerged as a key issue of contention for the Korean labor movement. In the case of Taiwan, the National Statistical Office does not track the composition of the labor force by the forms of employment, and as such it is hard to tell the extent of irregular workers in the labor market. However, firm surveys conducted by the CLA attest to a rising usage of contingent labor. Among private enterprises, the employment of part-time workers increased from 12.4 percent in 2003 to 18.4 percent in 2007, and the employment of dispatch workers rose from 3.6 percent to 5.5 percent during the same period (Ko 2007). These changes in the labor market have posed threats to the labor unions in Korea and Taiwan that have traditionally been strong in large corporations in the manufacturing sector. Organized labor is now undergoing changes in its core constituency as well as in its central labor agenda. Unions in the service sector and the SOEs have begun to play a central role in labor activism that was once led by blue-collar manufacturing workers in the private sector. Central labor issues in recent years have moved from union rights and higher wages to secure employment and anti-privatization. Public enterprise unions that were once regarded as entrenched in their privileged positions have become the flag bearers of militant mobilization. Female workers in retail shops, often seen as the unorganizable, have begun to appear in newspaper headlines because of their struggle for secure working conditions. Along this process of dual transitions involving political democratization and economic liberalization, union actors in Korea and Taiwan were asked to quickly adapt to these changing conditions. Yet their methods of mobilization, their interactions with other political actors, and the consequences of their actions quite dramatically differed under democratic governments. Structural approaches underscore that the preferences and capacities of labor actors are closely tied to the nation’s economic structure. Understanding the structural characteristics of national capitalism is an essential step when we are to explain the manifestation of labor politics. It helps to understand the foundation of workers’ economic interests, the degrees of union organization, and the potential leverage associated with unions’ structural positions. However, the most penetrating and recurring critique of this structural argument is the absence of politics. The interests and strengths of labor actors are more than just direct reflections of their positions within the economic

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25

structure. They are formed through political processes as much as they are economic structures. Workers and their organizations need to go through collective-action problems and interact with other political actors to exercise their collective strength to be able to achieve their goals. These processes are obviously conditioned by political contexts, past and present, which embody different avenues of opportunities and constraints. If we are to explain whether and how labor’s potential interests and capacities tied to their structural positions are actually manifested in labor politics, we have to turn to the politics of political interactions and examine how potentiality is translated into actuality. Therefore, the structural approach remains a partial explanation of labor relations because of the insufficient attention given to the constitutive effects of political conditions and political experiences on labor actors’ interests and strategies.

The Organizational Explanation Another approach within the literature of labor politics closely examines the organizational characteristics of labor unions. This literature, grounded in the Olsonian logic of interest aggregation and organizational incentives, takes the organizational features of interest groups as the core determinant of their interests and behaviors (Olson 1982; Cameron 1984; Calmfors and Driffill 1988; Garrett and Lange 1989; Pontusson 1992; Golden, Wallerstein, and Lange 1999). It is reasoned that encompassing organizations (more densely and centrally organized groups), in contrast to parochial ones, hold greater stakes in the overall performance of the economy. As a result, they show greater willingness to restrain demands and social disturbances that may create negative consequences for the whole. Nationally organized unions thus have incentives to hold down militant actions because of their higher stakes in the nation’s macroeconomic stability and growth. On the other extreme of this continuum, where unions are highly decentralized, collective-action problems inhibit labor militancy. These unions are too weak and are unable to organize effective and threatening actions against their employers or governments. In the middle of the spectrum, unions ­organized at the intermediate level have the strongest incentives to bargain aggressively, and they show the highest levels of militancy. This is because these narrowly organized unions pursue parochial interests at the expense of the overall economic performance. Therefore, the relationship between union organization and militant behavior should be an inverted “U” shape (Cameron 1984; Calmfors and Driffill 1988).

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This organizational approach has formed the basis of the literature on ­ uropean corporatism and welfare states, where nationally organized unions, E employers, and left-leaning parties in power engaged in centralized bargaining and exchanged labor peace for favorable social-protection policies (Gourevitch 1986; Garrett and Lange 1989; Pontusson 1992; Golden, Wallerstein, and Lange 1999). Although the specific organizational features varied from nation to nation, the basic mechanism that undergirded their tripartite settlement was broadly organized labor and capital. These national unions restrained collective actions for higher wages in exchange for the employers’ promise of secure employment and governments’ enactment of socialprotection programs. Studies of East Asian labor relations informed by this organizational approach have often highlighted the prevailing system of enterprise unionism. Yet these studies have offered two contrasting accounts of union behavior. Some studies argue that enterprise unionism is at the heart of union militancy in Korea, where unions are organized at the shop-floor level (Kim and Lim 2000; Yang 2006; Jeong 2007). These unions, they argue, are more prone to militant mobilization because they are not encompassing enough to care about the negative externalities of their militancy. As such, they pursue shortterm distributive gains at the expense of national economic growth or with little regard for the interests of unorganized workers. However, the same enterprise unionism was also used to explain organized labor’s quiescence in Asian economies (Pempel and Tsunekawa 1979; Choi 2002). Organized at the enterprise level, workers seem to develop loyalty to the company more than collective consciousness as a working class. Instead of seeking broad labor goals through political means, these enterprise unions exchange labor cooperation for company-level rewards because the ­immediate welfare of union members depends on the performance of the company. Because collective bargaining takes place at the level of individual unions, gains for employees vary across companies and consequently hamper efforts to build working-class solidarity. This individualized nature of company unionism, it is argued, leads to the political ineffectiveness of the labor movements in Japan and Korea. However, these organizational approaches, with their focus on enterprise unionism, fail to explain both the cross-national and longitudinal variations of labor politics in East Asia. Korea and Taiwan, in addition to Japan, have unions organized at the enterprise level, but each country has developed highly divergent labor movements with different degrees of labor militancy as well as political effectiveness. Japanese unions organized at the enterprise

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level shifted their modes of activism from confrontation to cooperation in the postwar decades (Kume 1998). Labor militancy in Japan reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, when unions were allied with the Socialist Party. Korean enterprise unions, on the other hand, have remained militant while lagging in gaining political influence. In another variation, enterprise unions in Taiwan relied on moderate methods of collective action but exercised effective political leverage. These contrasting paths of labor politics coexist within a number of organizational similarities—for example, enterprise unionism—particularly between Korea and Taiwan. Below I take a close look at the organizational features of Korean and Taiwanese unions and examine why organization alone is insufficient to fully explain union behavior. One note on union data needs to be made before proceeding to the main discussion. Union data for these two countries are available in printed or online formats from the Ministry of Labor (MOL) in Korea and the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) in Taiwan, which are the government agencies responsible for collecting and providing labor data. Although most scholars of labor relations use these official data without much skepticism, some of these raw data cannot be taken at face value because they lead to misunderstandings of the realities of union organizations. In describing major features of union organizations, I will discuss some of the noteworthy problems associated with the labor data available from these government sources. Whenever possible, I will present more accurate information on the union situation based on alternative sources I collected during my field research. When labor studies examine the organizational characteristics of unions in order to understand union interests, strengths, and their behavioral logic, they investigate (1) union density, understood as the portion of the workforce belonging to unions; (2) union coverage, the share of the workforce covered by a union agreement; (3) union concentration (or union competition) between and within union confederations; (4) union authority held by different levels of unions;11 and (5) the sectoral basis of unions (Valenzuela 1989; Baruni and Amadeo 1991; Golden, Wallerstein, and Lange 1999; Kuruvilla et al. 2002). When unions in Korea and Taiwan are examined along these five organizational aspects, as will be described in turn below, they show remarkable similarities. Union Density and Union Coverage Union density is one of the key indicators in gauging union strength. It is measured by the number of unionized workers among all paid employees. According to official statistics, the number of unionized workers has remained

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relatively low and steady compared to a gradual growth of paid employment in both countries.12 When Korea’s paid employees increased from 9.2 million in 1987 to 16 million in 2007, the number of unionized workers rose from 1.3 million to 1.7 million in the same period. Authoritarian regimes that inhibited union organizing in pre-1987 decades are primarily responsible for such low rates of unionization. Union density among Korean workers reached its peak in the early 1990s under the political fervor of democratization and gradually subsided in the following years, making Korea’s average union density for 1987–2007 to be 12.8 percent of paid employees. For the same past two decades, Taiwan’s paid labor force rose from 5.4 million to 7.7 million, with a similar increase in the number of unionized workers, from 2.1 million to 3 million. Except for a shortfall in 2002, union density in Taiwan has remained relatively constant, at an average of 41.1 percent for the last twenty years. Higher union density in Taiwan than in Korea appears to be quite ­counterintuitive. From the perspective of the structural theories of labor politics, the Taiwanese economy, dominated by small firms, does not provide favorable conditions for union organizing, not to mention union militancy. In fact, official data on union density create two misconceptions. First, it looks like more workers are organized in Taiwan than in Korea. This also leads to speculation that those Taiwanese unions might be more powerful than their counterparts in Korea. This cannot be more contrary to the reality of these unions, which begs further explanation and correction. The misconception of union data comes from a distinctive feature of Taiwanese union organizations. Unions in Taiwan are divided into two types: industrial unions and occupational unions. These two unions profoundly differ in their interests and functions, which the official data do not adequately represent, if not mislead. Industrial unions are the unions organized in manufacturing firms, and only these unions should be considered as unions when discussing labor relations or labor politics in Taiwan. The literally translated term industrial unions (chanye gonghui) creates confusion because they are not industrial federations but actually enterprise unions organized in the industrial sector. Perhaps enterprise (or company) unions would be a better translation. Occupational unions (zhiye gonghui), on the other hand, should not be counted as unions because they do not function as union organizations.13 Rather they operate as workers’ associations that provide small services to their members, who primarily join the union to gain eligibility for labor insurance programs, including health care (Huang 1999; Chen, Ko, and Lawler

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2003). The membership of these unions consists of self-employed professionals, entrepreneurs of small enterprises, and service-sector workers who belong to the same occupation but frequently change employers or workplaces.14 These unions are usually organized city-wide or county-wide and have no specific employers to bargain with. Thus, both the composition of union memberships and their functions fundamentally differentiate these occupational unions from the industrial unions, which are more interested in genuine union activities. Therefore, the key problem with Taiwan’s union-density data is that union membership is exaggerated by including occupational union members, who account for most of the national membership. Unions, in the usual sense, are mostly organized in large enterprises of the industrial sector, and only these unions should be counted if we are to make a fair cross-national comparison. By calculating the ratio of workers unionized under industrial enterprise unions to paid employees, Taiwan’s union density averages around 9.9  percent for the period of 1987–2007. With this correction, the average union densities in Korea and Taiwan turn out to be similar. Figure 2.4 presents the changes in union density in Korea and Taiwan for 1987–2007, including the adjusted union-density data for Taiwan.

Korea

Taiwan

Taiwan industrial unions

60.0 50.0 40.0 30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

figure

2.4  Union density in Korea and Taiwan, 1987–2007 (in percentages)

s o u rc e s :

Data from the Korea Ministry of Labor and the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, accessed on November 15, 2008. n o t e : Union density  (union members/paid employees)  100.

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How many workers are covered by collective agreements signed between unions and their employers? According to a report issued by the International Labour Organization (ILO), 12 percent of Korean workers and 3 percent of Taiwanese workers are covered by collective agreements.15 This means that most Korean unions engage in collective bargaining and sign a collective agreement, whereas not many Taiwanese unions have the same practice. This gap in union coverage is one of the differences between Korean and Taiwanese unions, and this discrepancy is associated with their different modes of mobilization (a theme to be fully discussed in Chapter 5). Here it suffices to note that Taiwanese unions are less interested in collective agreements at the company level because many of their grievances are resolved through local and national political channels. Korean workers, on the other hand, primarily rely on collective agreements to secure acceptable wage levels and working conditions because they have few institutional resources to affect formal political processes. Union Concentration Union concentration or union competition is measured by the number of peak-level union confederations and the distribution of union members among them. This indicator is used to gauge the abilities and effectiveness of unions in their decision making and interactions with employers and government. Unions that are under one national center, as opposed to those divided into many peak unions (i.e., national unions), can exert greater strength when bargaining with employers, governments, and other political actors. However, union autonomy should be an important factor to be considered beneath the sheer number of national confederations. If there is one single national union but it lacks autonomy because of its dependence on the government or political parties, the level of union concentration would be marked as high, but this would not serve as a proper indicator of union strength. Before the democratic transition in 1987, only one national confederation was in Korea and one in Taiwan. Korea’s Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) and Taiwan’s Chinese Federation of Labor (CFL) were the national unions organized and financed by the authoritarian governments. Because of their tainted origin, these officially sanctioned national centers suffered legitimacy problems from their very inception. The FKTU was established in 1946 under the auspices of the American Occupational Forces in South Korea as a right-wing instrument against the leftist unions, which were powerful and militant at the time. As such, this union center had little

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grassroots ­support and no genuine interest in promoting workers’ welfare for nearly four decades before the political democratization, in 1987 (Koo 2001, 26 –27). Even under democratic governments, this national union has continued to financially rely on government subsidies, a fact that significantly undermines the union’s autonomy and legitimacy. The situation with the Taiwanese CFL is not very different. The CFL, founded in Nanjing in 1948, was transplanted to Taiwan in 1949, when the KMT government retreated to the island. The KMT used the CFL as an administrative branch or party arm of the party/state to incorporate industrial workers. Through the Labor Union Law, the KMT mandated all unions in Taiwan to be affiliated with the CFL and sponsored its monopoly status. The authoritarian regime appointed the union leadership and poured the party budget into the union to finance its operation (Frenkel, Hong, and Lee 1993, 175 –77). As such, the union leaders had little idea or concern about genuine union activities and failed to work for the interests of their rank-and-file members. With political democratization, the number of unions and unionized workers steadily increased, and the rank-and-file unionists began to demand an alternative national center to represent their interests. In Korea the democratic union movement (minju nojo undong) culminated in the formation of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 1995. In Taiwan the independent union movement (zizhu gonghui yundong) began to be organized from the regional level in 1994 and eventually formed the national center, the Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU), in 1998.16 So both Korea and Taiwan have two national unions (a full discussion of the genesis of national unions appears in Chapters 3 and 5).17 In terms of union membership in each national confederation, the new national center of democratic unions in Korea recently surpassed the old union center. As of 2007, the FKTU commands about 41 percent (624,000 union members) and the KCTU about 44 percent (664,000 union members) of all unionized workers (Korea Ministry of Labor 2007). Taiwan’s CFL still maintains its dominance by representing 60 percent (1.4 million union members), in contrast to the TCTU, which represents 35 percent (800,000 union members) of the total union membership. This is because most of the occupational unions with a large membership are affiliated with the CFL, while many of the enterprise unions in the industrial sector belong to the TCTU.18 One thing to be noted about union affiliation with national centers in Taiwan is nonexclusivity. Because national confederations do not require an exclusive membership in subnational units, many of the lower-level unions either

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maintain dual affiliation or switch allegiance depending on the efficacy of each confederation. What are the implications of these multiple national unions for the development of labor politics in these two nations? In principle, labor scholars have assumed that a smaller number of union actors would result in better bargaining power because it is easier to prevent free riding, to induce compliance, and to obtain collectively optimal outcomes (Golden 1993). An increase in the number of peak union organizations is presumed to weaken the bargaining power of organized labor. Yet this may not necessarily be the case for new democracies such as Korea and Taiwan for two main reasons. First, the separation of democratic unions from those unions organized under past authoritarian governments reflects the increased strength and autonomy of rank-and-file workers, whose voices and interests had been muffled by the entrenched interests of a small number of co-opted union leaders. Second, the establishment of an alternative union creates positive competition among national centers. The conservative unions are often pressured to become more democratic and active by their affiliated unions or rank-and-file members, who threaten to switch their allegiance to the newly formed labor confederations. In fact, with the rise of independent unions, both the FKTU and the CFL have taken measures to internally democratize their decision-making procedures, to organize more members, and to engage more aggressively in collective bargaining on behalf of their rank-and-file members (interviews KA28-1, KA29-1, TA11-M). To a certain extent, then, an increasing number of union confederations in democratizing political context can be an indicator of the growing, not declining, strength of union movements and their rank-and-file workers. The formation of these democratic unions and their activities signify an increase in genuine union organizations and growth of worker-based labor movements. Union Structure and Authority Union authority is another important feature to consider in the analysis of labor politics. It signifies the level of actual collective bargaining as well as the breadth of union solidarity. In a European context, the authority of different levels of organization—national, industry, and enterprise—has been regarded as a central aspect that defines wage negotiations and industrial conflict. Encompassing unions, with their authority concentrated in a small number of large industrial unions or in national confederations, contribute to successful economic performance as well as the functioning of corporatist arrangements (Golden, Wallerstein, and Lange 1999).

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Union authority is defined by which of the three levels wields authority in wage and collective bargaining. As already discussed, both Korea and ­Taiwan have enterprise unionism. The enterprise-level unions exercise exclusive authority in bargaining for wages, signing collective agreements, collecting union dues, calling strikes, and settling disputes on behalf of their members. These individual company-level unions are affiliated with industrial federations and/or regional federations, and also with national peak unions. ­National centers coordinate and represent a collective voice of individual unions when negotiating with government and employers’ organizations over national labor-policy reforms. The organizational structure of these unions is illustrated in Figure 2.5. As discussed earlier, enterprise unionism is often associated with low union density, strong company identity among employees (instead of class consciousness), decentralized collective bargaining, broad inequalities within the working class, and organized labor’s political ineffectiveness (Suh 2009). For these reasons, authoritarian governments and employers in Korea and Taiwan preferred enterprise unions to industrial federations. In order to preempt workers’ solidarity and their collective action, authoritarians imposed a labor-control system that included specific restrictions on union organizing. Japanese enterprise unionism was endogenously developed from the prewar legacy of industrialization (Gordon 1992; Suzuki 1991), but the same union structure was imposed by dictators in Korea and Taiwan, with their political intention of pacifying industrial workers. Authoritarian regimes under Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan forced the reorganization of preexisting industrial unions into enterprise unions while exercising a tight control over a single national confederation (the FKTU) (Kim 1994). A similar strategy was used by the KMT regime in Taiwan. It allowed unions only in firms employing more than thirty workers and sponsored the monopoly of one single national federation (the CFL). As a way of labor control, authoritarians in Korea and Taiwan maintained enterprise unionism at the company level while co-opting union leadership at the national level. In recent years, the influence of upper-level unions has been increasing in Korea and Taiwan, although company unions still hold the authority in wage and collective-bargaining processes. Particularly in Korea, more unions are trying to be reorganized into industrial federations with collective-bargaining authority. The conservative FKTU is primarily based on enterprise unions, but the progressive KCTU has transformed most of its affiliates into industrial federations. As of 2007, about 70 percent of its members belong to industrial unions (KCTU Web site, accessed on December 1, 2007). However, these

A. Korea

National confederations

Regional federations

Industrial federations

Enterprise unions

B. Taiwan

National confederations

Regional federations

Occupational unions

Industrial federations

Enterprise unions figure note:

2.5  Union structure in Korea and Taiwan The direction of arrows indicates affiliational relations.

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federations do not exercise exclusive authority in collective bargaining on behalf of their members. They engage in so-called cross negotiations ( gyocha hyeopsang), wherein federations provide an industry-wide guideline to their members and participate in collective bargaining with respective employers’ organizations but where actual signing still resides with the individual ­company-level unions. Unions in the metal, hospital, and banking sectors have been most successful in reorganizing into industrial federations (Interview KA40-1). In Taiwan, unions in sectors targeted by the government for restructuring (most notably unions in SOEs and the banking sector) are increasingly working together to present the united voice of their members (interviews TA11-M and TW35-1). The most critical impediment to this transition to industrial unions is the reluctance of employers. They are not organized along industrial sectors and refuse to do so because of their fear of empowering the union actors. Yet this recent transition from enterprise unionism to industrial solidarity is an interesting phenomenon observed in Korea and Taiwan. This change goes against the trends in advanced industrial countries, where union movements have been heading toward increasing fragmentation and decentralization. The Organizational Basis of Unions The organizational basis of a union is another critical feature of union movements because it suggests the types of interests these unions represent and the relative leverage the unions carry in the process of labor politics. As Valenzuela notes, the unionization of key industries and sectors of national economies renders greater strength to organized labor beyond the organizational strength gauged by simple union-density data (1989, 453). In this regard, most employees in key national industries and sectors in Korea and Taiwan are organized. According to the Analysis of Labor Union Organizations (Ministry of Labor 2004) and other printed and online brochures from national union centers, the majority of union membership comes from the key sectors, such as heavy industry, transportation, and banking. By the criterion of industrial federations with more than 30,000 members, the FKTU consists of textile, chemical, metal, transportation, banking, and automobile sectors, whereas the KCTU is based on chemical, metal, transportation, banking, hospital, teachers, construction, and public enterprise unions. By the same standard, the CFL commands unions in SOEs, banking, transportation, construction, communication, and service sectors, whereas the TCTU leads SOEs, ­banking, and transportation federations.

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ta b l e 2 . 4

Common grounds of union organizations in Korea and Taiwan Union Density Union Coverage Union Concentration

Sectoral Basis

Taiwan

12.8% 12%

9.9% 3%

2 FKTU: 41%

Union Structure Union Authority

Korea

2 KCTU: 44%

Enterprise unionism E (I) (medium-low authority) FKTU

KCTU

CFL: 60%

TCTU: 35%

Enterprise unionism E (I) (medium-low authority) CFL

TCTU

Textile, chemical, Chemical, metal, SOEs, banking, SOEs, banking, metal, transpor­ transportation, transportation, and transportation tation, banking, banking, hospi­ construction, and automobile tal, teachers, and communication, SOEs and service sector s o u r c e s : This is a compilation of union-related data presented in preceding discussions, and the sources of information are the same. n o t e s : 1. Union density: an average for 1987–2007. For Korea  (union members/paid employees)  100. For Taiwan  (union members in industrial sector/paid employees in industrial sector)  100. 2. Union coverage  estimated percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements. 3. Union concentration  number of national peak unions and the membership share of national unions. In Taiwan there are six national unions, but only the CFL and the TCTU are significant actors. 4. Union structure: the level of unions that hold the authority to conduct wage and collective bargaining. 5. Union authority  dominant bargaining levels: C for company level, I for industrial level, and N for national level. 6. Unions’ sectoral basis: industrial sectors from which national unions draw the majority of their members.

From the organizational perspective, Korean unions are relatively more widely organized than Taiwanese unions in terms of sectoral diversity. Taiwanese unions are mostly organized in large SOEs and in sectors such as transportation and banking, but Korean unions are organized in a broader range of industries and sectors.19 Another feature of the Korean labor movement is the rise of white-collar-worker unions in areas such as banking, hospital, mass media, and teachers, and this phenomenon is closely related to Korea’s democratic movement tradition (Suh 2009). College students who had been active in pro-democracy movements found employment in the above sectors after graduation and sought to continue their democratic activism by forming unions in their workplaces. Based on the preceding discussions of the economic–structural conditions and organizational features of labor unions, Table 2.4 summarizes the key characteristics of labor unions in Korea and Taiwan. The table reflects corrections made to the “official” data based on supplementary information I

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collected from union sources as well as interviews with union activists and scholars during my field research. This groundwork for union data is an important step toward making informed comparisons of Korean and Taiwanese labor. Because statistical numbers may signify different things depending on political and economic contexts, it is crucial to weigh in such contextual differences when using and interpreting the officially available data. A close examination of the organizational features of labor unions in these two democracies reveals that they share more similarities than differences. The union density in post-democratization decades has averaged around 10 percent, with unions predominantly organized in large firms in key sectors such as heavy industry, finance, and transportation. The unions have maintained enterprise unionism with two national centers. The most visible difference is found in collective bargaining and signing agreements, which are a more regular union practice in Korea than in Taiwan. In the preceding sections, I have discussed the theoretical premises of structural and organizational analyses in labor-politics literature and presented empirical data on the economic structure and organizational features that undergird unions in Korea and Taiwan. Understanding the structural conditions of the national economy and union organizations constitutes an essential step when analyzing labor politics. It helps to situate workers and unions within the specifics of the national economy and to understand the scope of union organization and the foundations of unions’ interests and capacities. However, the preceding analysis has shown that both structural and organizational approaches have their own limitations in accounting for the variations of labor politics in Korea and Taiwan. First, the structural difference noted in terms of the proportion of the workforce in conglomerates and SMEs is less evident between these two economies than is often thought. They share more similarities than differences in terms of the ratio of workers employed in small firms and large firms, which has often been regarded as the most critical factor determining union organization. Obviously, this fact weakens the validity of structural explanations that attempt to deduce union militancy in Korea and union moderation in Taiwan from their economic structural differences. Structuralists have argued that Korea’s labor militancy comes from organized workers in large conglomerates, whereas the moderation of Taiwanese workers originates from collectiveaction problems associated with the predominance of SMEs. However, a careful investigation of structural conditions reveals that in both countries unions are predominantly organized in large firms within key industries, leaving the majority of SMEs unorganized. And it is these large company

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unions that engage in drastically different modes of labor politics in Korea and in Taiwan. An organizational approach to labor politics also fails to offer a satisfying explanation because Korean unions and their counterparts in Taiwan look more like twins than strangers. They share a number of organizational similarities in terms of union density, union centralization, union authority, and sectoral basis. Hence, the empirical puzzle of why labor unions in democratized Korea and Taiwan, despite their numerous structural and organizational similarities, have chosen drastically different modes of activism still waits for a more nuanced explanation.

Labor and Politics: Past and Present This study reflects the theoretical concerns shared in labor studies that emphasize the effects of politics, past and present. To fully understand the origins and processes of divergent labor politics, we need to go beyond economic structures and union organizations. This study refutes a simplistic understanding that labor’s interests and capacities can be directly deduced from its organizational structures or its place within the national economy. Workers’ interests and capacities are molded by historical experiences and political interactions. They are manifested in actual mobilization under specific opportunities and constraints offered by their political conditions. In this sense the theoretical explanations offered in this study are inspired by the tenets of historical and rational-choice institutionalism. The importance of politics is more pronounced in late democracies where organized labor has been placed under the direct influence of state actions. With the presence of strong authoritarian states in East Asia’s development, it was the state’s labor-control strategy that dictated the birth and death of labor unions. It was under these circumstances that workers formed their interests, capacities, and strategies. Workers in a polity transitioning from authoritarianism into democracy come to view labor politics as a democratic project through which they strive to achieve political and economic equality. Moreover, the changing conditions under democratic politics offer labor unions new possibilities and allies in strategizing their actions. In democratizing polities, workers and unions, as collective political actors, are fully immersed in the process of contestations and negotiations for political recognition and influence. This is why a systematic examination of distinct historical legacies and institutional mechanisms is required in labor studies (Collier and Collier 1991; Candland and Sil 2001; Murillo 2001; Ost and Crowley 2001; Robert-

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son 2004; Caraway 2008). Without disclosing the interactions between union actors and their past and present political environment, we cannot fully grasp the causal paths that lead to the national variations of labor politics. Building upon such theoretical orientations, I closely examine (1) how the methods of authoritarian control have preconditioned unions and other political forces (pro-democracy movement groups and opposition parties), (2) how the relationships between unions and these political forces (political ­party–union linkages) under democratic politics have shaped the manifestation of labor activism, and (3) how these different patterns of labor mobilization are associated with unions’ actual gains in post-democratization laborreform politics. Historical Legacies of Authoritarian Control From the perspective of historical institutionalism, social change is not a transition from one order to another but a transformation in which the old order and new one redefine each other (Thelen 1999). The conditions formed in the preceding period narrow possible choices of action in subsequent periods by exerting decisive influence on the following events or the environment in which these events take place. An examination of these prior conditions is thus crucial for “contextualized comparisons” (Locke and Thelen 1995) because it allows us to identify the effects of historical legacies on actors’ choices at the present time (Geddes 2003). Moreover, once these historical conditions are created, they become strongly self-reinforcing (Collier and Collier 1991; Pierson 2004). In this regard the legacies of the authoritarian past linger over the years of democratic transition and precondition the behavioral propensities and interactions of collective actors under democratic politics. As Robertson notes (2004, 265), Relationships between actors in the new environment and their connections with important social groups are not made de novo with the introduction of new constitutions and competitive elections. Instead, there are important continuities between the old and the new worlds. Old coalitions and old animosities retain some of their political momentum, even as they are refracted through the breakdown of one system and the construction of another.

The nature of dictatorship is argued to have critical ramifications for the development of political parties, party systems (Mainwaring 1999; Geddes and Frantz 2007), and civil society (Kubicek 2004; Bernhard and Karakoc 2007) in new democracies. Similarly, organized labor and industrial relations also bear the imprint of past regimes (Collier and Collier 1991; Buchanan 1995; Kubicek 1999; Pollert 2000; Ost and Crowley 2001; Robertson 2004;

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Cook 2007; Caraway 2008). Historical experiences during the authoritarian era influence the formation of union interests, capacities, expectations, and interactions with other socioeconomic actors in the post-transition period. Authoritarian legacies may limit certain choices while boosting other familiar strategies when unions enter democratic politics. With these influences, labor actors come to possess varied strengths, resources, and allies, which contribute to their successes or failures in their pursuit of democratic inclusion and labor reforms under democratic governments (Buchanan 1995; Haagh 2002; Cook 2007). Among other historical legacies, authoritarians’ labor-control strategy is crucial in shaping union movements in the post-transition period. In their groundbreaking comparative study of Latin American labor, Collier and ­Collier (1991) argued that states’ (or political parties’) strategies of labor incorporation during the critical juncture of the initial democratization period left lasting effects on labor in subsequent periods. This is more pronounced in late industrializers, where “governments played a pivotal role in determining the character and scope of the labor movement, the formal process of labor incorporation, the creation of labor laws, the resolution of industrial disputes, and the rights of workers and employers” (Candland and Sil 2001, 289). These effects have been observed in the third-wave democracies of Latin America (Drake 1996; Etchemendy 2004; Buchanan 2008) and in postcommunist countries where unions experienced varying degrees of state incorporation and suppression (Kubicek 1999; Pollert 2000; Ost and Crowley 2001; Robertson 2004). Particularly in East Asia, where the developmental state played a decisive role in carving political and economic trajectories ( Johnson 1982; WooCumings 1999), authoritarians’ influence on labor is even more pronounced. It was the state that decided where unions would be permitted, what kind of unions and collective actions would be tolerated, and what wage increases would be allowed. These regulations were sometimes based on labor laws and other times on political coercion. In short, the formation of labor-relations systems under authoritarian industrialization was the outcome of political decisions by the developmental state (Deyo 1989; Choi 1997). This aspect of industrial development has heightened the role of politics and state policies, instead of the function of employers or their voluntary coordination and negotiations with labor, in shaping worker interests and union movements. In short, authoritarian regimes have left distinctive legacies for labor unions regarding the nature of their grievances, their organization, and their political allies, and these legacies continue to exert influence on present labor

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politics. Among various legacies, authoritarians’ direct actions geared toward labor control may range from exclusion to incorporation. Labor incorporation is defined as the provision of channels for labor to use to voice and negotiate its interests. These channels include labor unions, work councils, labor representatives’ participation in government organizations such as a labor ministry, labor-related committees, and the legislature. The fewer the channels, the more likely that labor will be regarded as under state exclusion. More-inclusive policy toward labor is expected to moderate workers’ discontent and increase the use of existing channels, whereas more-exclusive policy radicalizes workers and forces them to seek a militant and independent path of organizing (Lipset 1983). Another form of legacy is authoritarians’ method of containing political opposition in general, which involves different degrees of institutional participation (electoral and administrative participation). These varying opportunities affect collective actors in choosing different arenas to articulate their claims (Kitschelt 2003, 83, emphasis mine). Under limited opportunities for formal politics, political opposition will develop as an outsider, investing more resources in building an outsider coalition. Under greater degrees of institutional participation, political opposition tends to put more resources in party-oriented coalitions to maximize the effectiveness of taking advantage of the given institutional openness. This strategic orientation of political opposition provides additional possibilities for labor’s path between moderation and militancy. Although authoritarian governments in Korea and Taiwan followed a similar trajectory of economic development at the expense of political freedom, their attempts to contain political opposition differed. Korean authoritarian regimes allied with large conglomerates and dictators’ hometown elites while employing a strategy of blatant exclusion to contain both labor and political opposition. Government-sponsored unions were allowed, but the extent of incorporation was restricted to a small number of the union leadership. Union exclusion was further carried out by authoritarian laws that prohibited unions’ political activities. These antilabor measures practiced both inside and outside workplaces radicalized the sentiment and goals of industrial workers. Opportunities for institutional participation were also limited and sporadic. The electoral space was completely shut down at the local level, whereas presidential contestation dominated national elections, if any were scheduled at all. Under these conditions, political opposition emerged in two forms. One was a pro-democracy coalition of critical intellectuals, college students, and labor that held a radical vision of Korea’s democratization (Kim 2000;

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Koo 2001; Lee 2007). The other consisted of opposition politicians grouped around presidential contenders. High degrees of political oppression and exclusion under authoritarian regimes not only radicalized political dissenters but also brought workers and opposition groups together. It was under these conditions that Korean unions entered the democratic era in the late 1980s. In the case of Taiwan, the authoritarians’ status as a minority émigré regime made the authoritarians rely on a different method to contain political opposition. Their central goal was defined as securing mainlanders’ tight control over the national-level economic and political structure while offering incorporation opportunities to local Taiwanese at subnational levels. As part of this control strategy, the KMT placed the large public enterprises under its control and incorporated official unions into its governing organization while leaving small businesses in the hands of Taiwanese entrepreneurs (Lee 1988; Chu 1989). Political participation at the national level was completely halted under martial law, whereas local elections continued in the authoritarian decades (1950 and onward) as a way of incorporating native elites. Electoral space at the local level offered the political opposition opportunities to experience and advance into formal politics. These political conditions helped the anti-KMT, pro-democracy coalition to be formed under the leadership of election-oriented groups. This coalition organized dissident intellectuals and workers around a democratic vision of restoring the nativist Taiwanese identity (Fan 2000; Yang 2007). Therefore, with the incorporation channels provided by official unions and a democratic coalition led by an opposition party, the utility of these institutional opportunities loomed for Taiwanese workers. For unions in Taiwan, political means were to be exploited, not to be rejected or confronted, as was the case for Korean unions. It was with these varying authoritarian legacies that Korean and Taiwanese unions entered the democratization process. Democratization, Political Party–Union Linkages, and Labor Politics Political democratization, broadly understood as the (re)instatement of electoral competition to select government leaders, brings about a dramatic change in a polity’s landscape. Although it also involves the persistence of old politics, democratic transition accompanies a huge change in political institutions and reorients the ways in which individual citizens and collective actors pursue their previously suppressed political and economic interests. Unions, as one of the most visible collective actors in the process of democratization, calculate the costs, benefits, and feasibility of different modes of mobilization and weigh the possibilities of using different institutional channels. If demo-

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cratic politics provides meaningful channels and allies for the inclusion and representation of labor interests, union actors will eventually become institutionalized. By the same logic, if a newly introduced democratic system fails to offer institutional representation of labor, unions will remain as outsiders and engage in confrontational strategies because of their accumulated frustrations with the formal political process. Here the relationships between political parties and unions are of crucial importance because political parties are the principal agents that articulate, aggregate, and represent varying social interests in democratic politics. Without even referring to the famous quotation from Schattschneider (1942) that a modern democratic system is unthinkable without political parties, democracy scholars have often equated democratic politics with party politics. The quality of democratic governance is considered to be associated with the effectiveness of political parties because parties link citizen interests to government action, give order to legislative processes, reduce problems of multidimensionality of the issue space, and allow voters to hold politicians accountable (Sartori 1976; Aldridge 1995; Mainwaring 1999; Stokes 1999). Because democratization regularizes electoral contestation, where political parties compete for office, parties emerge as key vehicles for democratic representation. Political parties offer possibilities if transitional “street politics” will find its way into institutionalized political processes. For these reasons, the relationship between labor unions and political parties has been a recurring theme in the labor-politics literature. These studies examine how the partisan relations affect unions’ propensity for militancy and the extent of labor-policy concessions. Historical experiences of labor movements in many European and Latin American countries show that alliances between unions and political parties have been critical factors in shaping union behavior (Marks 1989; Collier and Collier 1991; Nelson 1991; Murillo 2001; Burgess 2004; Bartolini 2007), macroeconomic performance (Katzenstein 1985; Garrett and Lange 1989; Alvarez, Garrett, and Lange 1991; Garrett 1998), and welfare-state regimes (Hicks 1999; Huber and Stephens 2001). This exchange of labor restraint and compensational policies has been evident in Sweden and Germany (Swenson 1989), in Italy (Contarino 1995), in post-Franco Spain (Encarnacion 2001), and in many Latin American economies undergoing structural reforms (Levitsky and Way 1998; Murillo 2001; Levitsky 2003; Tafel and Boniface 2003; Burgess 2004; Etchemendy 2004; Cook 2007). Here the core reasoning revolves around the exchange between organized labor and political parties. Labor unions support their partisan allies in elections and tend to moderate militant actions. This becomes possible ­because

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Union strength Strong

Weak 1. Social corporatist 2. Between restraint and militancy 3. Militant

Weak

4. Feeble

Partisan alliance figure

2.6  Typology of partisan relations and labor politics

the partisan ally represents labor interests in the formal political process and is able to influence the direction of macroeconomic, welfare, and labor policies. Unions that fail to build a systematic and lasting relationship with a political party remain outside of institutionalized politics and are more likely to resort to unconventional and confrontational mobilization activities. For organized labor, however, it is not enough to have a pro-labor partisan ally. The restraint of militancy would follow only when unions’ partisan ally is able to have a significant impact on the policy-making process. This means that the party has to be effective enough to hold or share government power to be able to provide inducements in the form of labor policy or material benefits (Levitsky and Way 1998; Tafel and Boniface 2003). Unions, too, need to have organizational muscle (measured by union density, breadth, and centralization) to be able to induce and enforce the exchange with partisan allies. From this discussion, four different types of partisan relations and laborpolitics outcomes can be identified (Figure 2.6). Quadrangle 1 represents the combination of broadly organized, unified unions and pro-labor parties in power that produces social democratic outcomes. However, because most union actors are not unitary but are more often divided into several federations (degree of union centralization or union competition), Quadrangle 2 corresponds to divided unions that may fluctuate between restraint and militancy depending on which party is in power (Murillo 2001; Robertson 2004). More restraint will be observed when its own ally is incumbent, but more militancy will be expressed when its competitor is in power. Quadrangle 3 represents cases where high levels of militancy are expected when unions

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have a certain level of organizational strength but no partisan ally. Quadrangle 4 shows feeble labor movements where unions are organizationally weak and have no political ally at all. What conditions aid the formation of these political party–union linkages? This study focuses on three aspects that bond political parties and unions together. An ideological affinity between parties and unions, an organizational stability of political parties, and actual participation of labor politicians in party politics will enhance such partisan linkages. To harness labor mobilization into institutional politics, there must be a party that represents labor interests. This presupposes that the political divisions that characterize party competition contain some sort of distributional dimension. The existence of a party that represents labor interests will present important institutional opportunities and increase organized labor’s appreciation of formal political processes. However, this ideological affinity alone cannot sustain partisan linkages (Levitsky and Way 1998). Pro-labor parties need to be organizationally stable enough to enable credible commitments from the union side. Unions may not find organizationally weak and unstable parties to be worthy political partners. Also, these parties should be electorally strong enough to be a ruling party or a partner in the ruling coalition, or offer prospects of becoming so, to be able to reward organized labor with favorable policies and material rewards. In short, the organizational stability and electoral strength of prolabor parties are instrumental in harnessing union militancy under a representative democratic system. Last, the representation of labor interests should be reflected in the actual presence of labor-related politicians in party politics. Political parties can practice this by nominating pro-labor candidates in electoral races or appointing them to key positions within parties or government administration. For instance, the actual participation of politicians with a labor background in party politics and elected seats will enhance the credibility of these political parties in representing labor interests. Viewed from this theoretical framework, labor unions in democratized Korea did not have a political party that represented distributional issues until they formed their own Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in 2000. Yet this party has since remained electorally weak. The major political division that has dominated party competition has been regionalism, which has further divided workers’ votes. Korean parties have been institutionally unstable as a result of constant splits and mergers, and opposition parties on the liberal side have been equally under-institutionalized. The DLP that was organized with the support of democratic unions entered the national legislature for the first time in 2004 with 10 legislators in the 299-seat National Assembly. In the last

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six national legislative elections (1988 –2008), less than 2 percent of all elected legislators had a career background in labor (detailed discussion and data appear in Chapter 4). In short, Korean workers found no political representation in Korea’s democratic system and remained as institutional outsiders who had to take their issues to the streets. When Taiwan democratized and electoral competition expanded to national levels, the DPP emerged as a formidable opposition force representing nativist interests of the Taiwanese people. Workers who identified their grievances as ethnic injustices saw their interests being represented by the DPP. Emerging from years of electoral experience at the local level, the DPP was organizationally stable and effective to the extent of capturing the presidency in 2000 and the Legislative Yuan in 2001. With systematic linkages with labor unions, the DPP as well as the KMT allocated about 4 percent of seats to legislators with labor backgrounds. Although the DPP is not a prolabor party in the strict sense, for democratic unions it has been the party that has provided access to both local and national policy-making institutions. As a result, unions in Taiwan became insiders in the formal political process because of the aid of political parties. Unions’ Mobilization and Gains in Labor Reforms With political democratization, unions mobilize their members and take actions to defend and improve their rights and material gains. Many newly instated democratic governments are pressured to undertake reforms in laborrelated laws and policies that are the remnants of the authoritarian period. Yet these late democratizers are faced with a serious dilemma. On the one hand, democratization calls for the expansion of union rights and representation and, as such, increases labor strength. But on the other hand, neoliberal adjustment pressures require increased deregulation in the labor market that consequently undermines the leverage of newly invigorated labor unions. Union actors have engaged in these labor-reform processes with varying methods and gained varied outcomes. How are their actions related to their achievements in labor-reform politics? Building upon the preceding discussions, unions’ mode of mobilization, conditioned by historical legacies and partisan representation, is expected to produce patterned differences in laborreform outcomes.20 Actions taken by collective actors reflect the opportunities and constraints found within the specific configurations of political institutions. Under these opportunities and constraints, collective actors find that certain strategies of influence are more attractive and efficacious than others and produce certain

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outcomes more effectively than others (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; MacIntyre 2003; Meyer and Minkoff 2004).21 The specific mode of union activism reflects the union’s strength in different resources (political or organizational) and shows where and how these resources are targeted in the political process to achieve union goals. The differing strategies employed by labor unions influence the process of labor-policy reform in certain ways and consequently create patterned differences in reform outcomes. Labor scholars have observed that when unions have linkages with political parties, they have been able to influence the direction and content of labormarket reforms (Levitsky and Way 1998; Encarnacion 2001; Murillo 2001; Levitsky 2003; Tafel and Boniface 2003; Burgess 2004; Etchemendy 2004; Cook 2007). This means that unions with partisan allies articulate their demands through institutional channels and are able to extract more policy reforms than the unions that lack such partisan representation. With the presence of friendly parties, partisan unions are expected to mobilize resources for political pressuring. Consequently, the labor-reform process will involve politicized negotiations yielding more gains in national policy changes. Independent unions with little access to institutional politics are prone to resort to mobilization strategies, and as a result, the labor-reform process will be confrontational and protracted. These unions may be less successful in national policy reforms but more successful in areas where labor’s sheer mobilizing strength matters, such as company-level bargaining for wages and other material benefits. To examine how the different modes of union activism are linked to actual gains for unions in democratized Korea and Taiwan, this study analyzes four labor-reform episodes in which key labor issues were contested and transformed: union-rights recognition, wage increases, workweek reductions, and job protection/anti-privatization. This analysis reveals that union activism under democratic governments involved contrasting processes and produced divergent labor-reform outcomes. The major strategy of Korean unions in the labor-reform process was contentious mobilization. As unions found no mediating political forces to represent their interests in formal political process, labor-reform politics became highly confrontational and futilely protracted. Although unions’ mobilization capacities were instrumental in raising wages and benefits at the company level (where unions are organized), the lack of partisan representation obviously limited the unions’ effectiveness in national policy changes in areas of union rights, workweek reduction, and anti-privatization campaigns. On the contrary, the major strategy of Taiwanese unions in labor-reform politics was lobbying and pressuring political parties and individual ­politicians.

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ta b l e

2.5

Variety of labor politics in Korea and Taiwan Authoritarian Control Korea

Exclusion of unions Despotic oppression Marginalized elections

Taiwan Incorporation of unions Ethnic divisions Continued local elections

Labor Unions

Union–Party Relations

Labor Politics

Labor-Reform Outcomes

Radical vision of democracy Independent organizing Labor  social movements

No partisan Independent More companylinkages Militant level than Cross-cutting national policy divisions gains Unstable parties No labor representation

Democracy as ethnic justice Dependent organizing Labor  opposition party

Partisan linkages Partisan Reinforcing Moderate divisions Stable parties Labor representation

More national policy than company-level gains

Unions took advantage of the partisan competition between the KMT and the DPP as well as the division between the central and local governments, where these parties competed for power. Taiwanese unions were able to politicize the labor-reform agenda and maneuvered to gain policy concessions. The process of labor-reform politics was faster and more accommodating than in the case of Korea. As a result, union actors proved to be effective in securing their gains in national labor reforms, but less so in respect to their company-level wage demands that require mobilizational strength in terms of their employers. Table 2.5 summarizes the theoretical arguments made in this study by tracing the causal connections from the legacies of authoritarian control methods to the political party–union linkages, to the mode of labor activism, and finally to unions’ gains in labor-reform politics. In short, the theoretical framework of this research stresses the importance of politics, past and present, in understanding the manifestation of union mobilization. Labor politics is a matter of a democratic project where union actors seek representation and influence. As such, authoritarian legacies and the specific configurations of democratic politics critically shape unions’ modes of interest articulation and their achievements in labor-reform negotiations. Economic structural differences and the organizational characteristics of unions constitute important factors in gauging their potential interests and capacities for collective mobilization, but these potentials are adjusted, negotiated, and finally materialized through the opportunities and constraints found in the political context. This research asserts the importance of democratic politics and the extent of

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democratic representation of labor interests by political parties in the making of national variations of labor politics. Labor’s representation and inclusion through partisan allies moderate the mode of labor activism by guiding unions to address the labor agenda through institutionalized formal political processes. Unions that lack partisan representatives to resolve their grievances remain as outsiders in democratic politics and resort to an outsider method of radical mobilization. As much as democratic politics is all about party politics, labor politics under democratic governments reveals another side of party politics.

3

Authoritarian Legacies and Democratic Coalitions in Korea and Taiwan

We became political opposition first and labor activists later. Lee Hong-jun, lifelong labor activist in Taiwan

The purpose of this chapter is to closely examine the political conditions for labor unions in the pre-1987 period. The analytical focus is placed on how authoritarian regimes controlled labor and political opposition and what type of relationship between the two emerged from this authoritarian experience. The chapter begins with a look at the impact of authoritarian legacies on labor unions by explicating authoritarians’ control strategies and their influence on labor actors’ perceptions and capacities when they entered a democratic phase in the late 1980s. It proceeds to discuss the relationship between labor unions and other collective actors (political parties and pro-democracy movement groups) and how this political coalition has shaped the development of newly emerging labor movements.

Historical Legacies of Authoritarian Control Korea and Taiwan are rare cases that share very many similarities in their path for political and economic development. Both spent the first half of the twentieth century under Japanese colonialism and underwent a national division into communist and capitalist halves. Under the Cold War confrontation, unpopular dictators were sustained largely with the economic aid, security provisions, and political support provided by the United States. Authoritarians, in their competition with communist regimes across the border, transformed themselves into effective interventionists for economic development and led export-oriented industrialization starting in the early 1960s. The following

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ta b l e 3 . 1

Chronology of political and economic development in Korea and Taiwan Korea

Taiwan

Japanese Colonialism

1910 –1945

1895 –1945

Authoritarian Regimes

1948 –1960: under Rhee Syngman 1961: democratic interlude 1961–1979: under Park Chung Hee 1980 –1987: under Chun Doo Hwan

1949: under Chiang Kai-shek, martial law 1975: under Chiang Ching-kuo

Democratic Transition

1987: first democratic presidential election 1992: Kim Young Sam, first civilian president 1997: Kim Dae Jung, first transfer of power to opposition

1987: lifting of martial law 1992: first full legislative election 1996: first democratic presidential election 2000: Chen Shui-bian, first transfer of power to opposition

Economic Development

1950s: import-oriented industrialization 1960s: export-oriented industrialization Mid-1970s: focus on heavy industries Late-1980s: high-tech industries, economic liberalization

1950s: import-oriented industrialization 1960s: export-oriented industrialization Mid-1970s: focus on heavy industries Late-1980s: high-tech industries, economic liberalization

decades witnessed a rapid industrial expansion and a growth in real income levels. Economic success accompanied the surge of industrial workers and the middle class, both of which becoming increasingly disgruntled with the political status quo. To curtail the rising political opposition, dictatorial regimes had to rely on political surveillance, ideological indoctrination, and security apparatuses. However, a democratic coalition of college students, critical intellectuals, political dissidents, and industrial workers was able to pressure authoritarians to open the door for political democratization. As an overview of their post-1945 historical contours, Table 3.1 summarizes the chronology of these political and economic developments in Korea and Taiwan. However, beneath their shared similarities in economic development and industrial policies, authoritarians’ specific strategies to contain political dissention differed. Because of their own strengths and constraints regarding domestic and international conditions, these regimes devised and relied on varying methods of incorporation and suppression to contain political opposition, including labor. Korean authoritarian regimes heavily relied on exclusionary control strategies, whereas Taiwan’s one-party rule employed various incorporation methods. Here I discuss authoritarians’ labor-control methods during the pre-1987 decades and analyze how workers and unions developed their perspectives and capacities for labor movements. This discussion is organized along three themes: (1) an overview of authoritarians’ labor-control

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strategies, (2) the role of “official” unions, and (3) the nature of class consciousness and the rise of a “democratic” union movement.

Authoritarians’ Labor Control in Korea Authoritarians’ labor-control strategies depend on their strengths and weaknesses regarding domestic and international forces. They seek to build coalitions with labor only when they have incentives to expand their power base and need to increase regime legitimacy. Otherwise, their general orientation would be to put labor unions under their political control in order to minimize the possibilities of revolt by industrial workers. Regimes’ efforts to build coalitions with labor—that is, labor incorporation— can be observed in the provision of channels to labor to voice and negotiate its interests. These channels include labor unions, work councils, and labor representatives’ ­participation in government organizations such as the labor ministry, labor-­ related committees, and the legislature. Authoritarians that rely on the labor-­ exclusion method would offer few of these channels, and as a consequence workers would find it frustrating to resolve their grievances. More-inclusive policy toward labor is expected to moderate workers’ discontent and to increase their inclination to use the existing channels, whereas more-exclusive policy tends to radicalize workers and force them to seek a militant and independent path of organizing. The overall orientation of authoritarian regimes in post–Korean War South Korea was to build a political alliance with domestic capitalists while excluding labor and suppressing political opposition (Choi 1997). These regimes employed a partial incorporation policy that was largely regarded as provisional and perfunctory. A government-sponsored union federation existed, but its leadership was co-opted either through material rewards or political coercion. Workers’ organizing or protest outside of this official union boundary was met by brutal violence. The first government in South Korea, under Rhee Syngman, suffered a lack of social-support base and as such tried to create labor unions and incorporate them into its ruling organization. The U.S. Army military government that was in charge of South Korea from 1945 to 1948 leaned toward a group of exiled nationalists led by Rhee while delegitimizing and suppressing the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence and Peoples’ Committees. These indigenously formed, self-governing organizations with nationwide bases and popularity were seen as being too “left” by Americans (Cumings 1997). Because of Rhee’s lifelong exile in the United States,

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­ owever, he lacked power bases within South Korea. His political choices h were thus geared toward building political alliances with the conservative forces who had served the Japanese (ibid.).1 The “official” union federation was created under this political context. Workers had formed the National Council of Korean Labor Unions (  Jeonpyeong in short) in 1945 with more than 500,000 members, but Rhee and his U.S. supporters viewed these unions as too “independent” and instead sponsored the organization of a second national center, the Federation of Korean Trade Union (FKTU or Daehan nochong), the following year (Kim 1994).2 This union was primarily set up as an anticommunist organization, with its main function to crack down violently on independent labor movements— that is, Jeonpyeong. During the Rhee government (1948 –1960), the FKTU was incorporated into the ruling party as an official organization. Because of this tainted origin, the FKTU has suffered from a legitimacy predicament from its very inception. The Rhee government ended in 1960 with student protests precipitated by the regime’s massive election rigging. A new government was formed through democratic elections, but this democratic interlude was rather short-lived as the result of the military coup by Park Chung Hee in 1961. Labor policy under the Park regime (1961–1979) was twofold: to continue the political subordination of labor unions and to impose legal limits on union activities. Right after the military coup, the FKTU (along with all other civic organizations) was first completely dissolved and then re-created under guidance from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) (Kim 1995). In 1963 labor laws were amended to limit union organizing and collective action, particularly to disallow any possible linkages between unions and political parties.3 According to Hagen Koo, the main motivation of the Park regime in restructuring labor unions was primarily political rather than economic: “to keep organized labor depoliticized and disconnected from political opposition groups” (2001, 28). Particularly, the legal prohibition of unions’ political activities or unions’ alliance with political parties set a crucial linchpin in how Korean labor movements developed in the following decades. Under these legal provisions, intended to preempt a linkage between labor and political parties, unions had to seek alternative partners in their goal of developing as a labor movement. With the official union, the authoritarian regime granted a monopoly of representation to the FKTU and directly intervened in the leadership selection and finance of the labor federation. Because the FKTU was organized from the top down as a way of incorporating several union leaders into the

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authoritarian regime, it failed to develop into a rank-and-file-based national center (Kim 1994). The union remained more like a perfunctory organization led by a small number of union presidents. Some of these union leaders were nominally given seats in the national legislature or government committees, such as the Social Welfare Examination Committee, the Wage Committee, the Central Labor Committee, and the Industrial Accident Compensation Committee (Kim 1995, chapters 1 and 5). However, the inclusion of union leaders in government committees was more symbolic rather than meaningful in terms of participation in policy formation or consultations. Starting in 1972, Park intensified his draconian authoritarianism by launching the Yushin regime. Martial law was imposed, the National Assembly was dissolved, and the president enjoyed unlimited emergency decree power. Along with these institutional reversals, the police, the KCIA, and military intelligence emerged at the fore of governing apparatuses. Labor unions faced further severe limitations as well. Labor laws were revised in 1973 with clauses to ban workers’ collective action and to impose compulsory arbitration in cases of disagreeable collective bargaining. Ideological indoctrination was also introduced in the name of the Factory Saemaeul (New Village) Movement to enhance labor productivity and workers’ compliance in the workplace (Lee 1990).4 Park’s military rule abruptly ended with his assassination in 1979, but the political vacuum was seized by another military general, Chun Doo Hwan. Chun’s labor-control method was the continuation, if not further aggravation, of the Yushin era in the sense that he relied on repressive labor laws and security forces to contain labor mobilization. Labor laws were further strengthened to restrain the role of labor unions. One of the critical changes for labor unions was the introduction of enterprise unionism. The previous system of industrial unions (even though they were unable to properly function as such) was revamped into enterprise unions to decentralize and curtail the organizational strength of workers (Kim 1994). Along with this reorganizing, single unionism was imposed at both the factory level and the national level. This meant that once a pro-management labor union was set up in the workplace, workers had no alternative venue for representation at the factory level. At the national level, the FKTU continued to monopolize national representation, with a small number of union leaders being incorporated into the authoritarian regime. It was this single unionism along with the union-isolation policy that constituted the key features of the labor-control method under military regimes. With the single unionism clause, existing unions were often the creation of

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55

government agencies or under the control of management. The Trade Union Act further limited these unions by prohibiting the use of union funds for political activity (Kim 1994). In addition, the act banned anyone who was not a union member, such as laid-off unionists, lawyers, politicians, or labor activists, from assisting in union affairs (a prohibition of a third-party intervention). These legal restrictions were called the “three vicious labor clauses” by the labor side and represented the extent to which authoritarian states intervened in the formation and development of labor movements. In addition to these legal restrictions, intelligence agencies were deeply involved in curtailing union activism. It was neither the Ministry of Labor nor regional labor councils but the KCIA that was the central adjudicator in Korean industrial relations (Song 1991).5 The KCIA supervised union cadres by assigning hundreds of intelligence agents who specialized in anticommunist tasks to key industrial sites (Ogle 1990; Song 1991). Testimony by a Korean politician who was once a union activist in the early 1980s reveals the degree of the involvement of political apparatuses in labor affairs. According to him (Interview KP31-1), Before 1987, the KCIA was the ultimate judge of labor affairs. When there was a labor dispute, a KCIA agent would step into the shop floor, call in the top manager of the company, union leaders, and the local police officer, and simply convey the verdict of how much wages would be increased or not increased and how many union activists would be imprisoned. Period!

This brief historical survey of authoritarian labor control in the 1970s and 1980s provides a general picture of labor-union co-optation and the political exclusion of industrial workers in Korea. Throughout this period, the government approached industrial relations with a clear pro-capital, antilabor stance by co-opting union leadership and by controlling workers with security forces instead of with labor administrative measures. The legal restrictions placed on union activities attest that authoritarians’ emphasis was placed on preempting the formation of linkages between labor unions and political forces. It was under these circumstances that Korean workers began to form their consciousness about their workplace experiences and political ­environment. As authoritarians maintained a blatant antilabor policy, Korean employers enjoyed the license to rely on despotic practices of labor exploitation at workplaces to maximize their profits. Workers’ experiences on the shop floor were harsh and appalling during the rapidly industrializing decades of the 1970s and 1980s.6 When workers voiced their grievances through spontaneous collective action, they were quelled by management-hired thugs or police

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forces, or both. These “extremely abusive and despotic work relations in the factories” became the ultimate source of workers’ political consciousness and mobilization (Koo 2001, 16). In many instances of labor protest, the most urgent demands were humane treatment and justice rather than higher wages or better working conditions (ibid., with original emphasis). The gruesome realities of workers in the 1970s were epitomized by the death of a garment worker, Chun Tae-il, who self-immolated in 1970, shouting “We are not machines.” After this incident, two social groups in South Korea began to be drawn into labor realities: critical intellectuals and religious organizations (Koo 2001; Lee 2007). According to Koo’s account of the rise of the Korean labor movement, students and intellectuals played a critical role in the development of democratic unionism, a role equivalent to that of the artisans’ involvements in the formation of the working-class movements in nineteenth-century Europe (2001, 9 –10). Intellectuals’ direct participation in labor issues during the 1970s was rather individualized and limited, but its magnitude expanded beginning in the late 1970s. Pro-democracy student activists formulated a more articulate vision of their activism around the concept of minjung (literally meaning “common people”). In this vision, critical intellectuals defined industrial workers, peasants, and the urban poor as the true agents of South Korea’s social transformation, whose historical subjectivity had to be restored (Lee 2007). Inspired by this minjung project, a large number of (former) student activists entered factories in the industrial towns near the cities of Seoul and Inchon.7 These students-turned-workers organized workers into small, informal groups in efforts to foster class consciousness through education, discussions, and recreational activities. Another social organization that came to be involved in the incipient stage of the Korean labor movement was the church. Influenced by a progressive theology (minjung shinhak), church groups of various denominations provided support and shelter to workers and union activists. They ran night schools for factory workers and offered classes on labor laws and workers’ rights in addition to regular school curricula. They also organized various small-group activities, such as hiking excursions and cultural events, where workers shared their experiences through writing, singing, and storytelling (Koo 2001, 74). Two groups, the Urban Industrial Mission and the Young Catholic Workers, were deeply involved in these activities, and their participants were often placed on the KCIA’s wanted list (Ogle 1990). Ironically, authoritarians’ attempts to forestall the emergence of independent unionism outside the government-controlled FKTU and to prevent the development of connections between workers and political opposition groups

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produced unwanted consequences for the regime. First, factory workers were increasingly radicalized; they had no official channel to address the mounting grievances and resentments coming from their experiences in and out of their workplaces. Because of authoritarians’ direct involvement in industrial relations and labor repression, workers began to see the linkages between their economic exploitation and political oppression. Second, solidarity between workers and intellectuals (nohak yeondae) against authoritarian rule was created and strengthened because the state’s continued repression of labor drew an increasing number of college students into factory towns and labor causes.8 It was under these political circumstances that an alternative labor movement in the name of a “democratic union movement” (minju nojo undong) was formed outside of the official FKTU.9 Union activists involved in this new movement viewed the FKTU as completely co-opted and controlled either by management or authoritarian regimes. As such, they positioned themselves as the antithesis of what the FKTU stood for. Democratic unionism aspired to be “democratic” in representing workers’ interests and to be “independent” from political subordination. Under the legal limitation of single unionism, these unionists tried to replace the leadership of co-opted unions or to form new unions in unorganized workplaces. With political democratization beginning in 1987, democratic and independent unions began to be formed in increasing numbers. These unions established the National Congress of Trade Unions (NCTU, or Jeonnohyeop) in 1990. In 1995 this national center expanded and changed into the Korea Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). With the establishment of the KCTU, Korean labor movements were led by two national centers. (A more detailed account of this process will be discussed in Chapter 5.) In summary, authoritarian regimes in Korea employed a combination of co-optation and exclusion to control labor. The FKTU was placed under government control and patronage, and union activism outside this official structure was suppressed by labor laws and security apparatuses. Legal restrictions were extended to ban unions from seeking linkages with political parties. The severity of political exclusion and despotic labor practices at workplaces did not only radicalize workers’ grievances but also drew critical intellectuals, college students, and religious groups into labor issues. It was these social forces that contributed to the development of a democratic and independent labor movement that later formed the backbone of Korea’s militant unionism. This pro-democracy coalition projected a radical vision of democratization in which labor issues were an important component to be addressed under democratic governments.

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Authoritarians’ Labor Control in Taiwan In the case of Taiwan, the KMT’s status as a minority émigré regime was a critical factor in its design of opposition-control strategies. The authoritarian regime relied largely on two measures: One was to completely incorporate social organizations, including labor unions, into the party–state institution, and the other was to preempt the empowerment of local Taiwanese through ethnic divisions. The KMT’s move to the island of Taiwan began in 1945, with the end of Japanese colonialism, and was completed in 1949, when the KMT was defeated by the communists in mainland China. It was a flight of 1.5 million mainlanders, mostly state employees and military personnel, to a local society of 7 million residents (Cheng and Haggard 1992). Local Taiwanese consisted of the people who migrated to the island from various provinces of mainland China beginning in the eighteenth century, in addition to Taiwanese aborigines. The first ethnic antagonism erupted in 1947 with what is known as the “February 22 Incident,” in which thousands of Taiwanese were killed in their protest against the KMT.10 The Nationalists continued White Terror against the local population in their attempt to eradicate communist influence from the mainland and to destroy the indigenous leftist element on the island. On the economic front, the KMT took over and nationalized more than 1,200 colonial assets, including railways, sugar refining, electricity, petrochemicals, and metals (Ho 2007). From the fear that private-sector growth would inevitably strengthen the native Taiwanese, the regime placed the large public enterprises under its control while leaving small businesses in the hands of Taiwanese entrepreneurs (Chu 1989). Beginning in 1950, the KMT initiated a full-blown reorganization of Taiwanese society to enable the party’s “Leninist control” (Cheng 1989; Ho 2007; Yang 2007). The basic tenet of this reorganizing was to have party cells penetrate into every segment of the government, the military, and the social sectors. Public corporations (such as SOEs) and labor unions were also part of this incorporation process. To increase the party’s penetration into industries, a special task force was set up to build a party branch in every nationalized factory and a party cell in every shop floor. Workers were recruited to join the party, and the personnel in the management of corporations increasingly overlapped with KMT cadres. The party branch in factories was often called an “Employee Relations Committee” and was responsible for “promoting national policies, communicating with employees, investigating employees’ work and life, and coordinating with the union welfare committee” (Ho 2007, 169). In short, major workplaces turned into KMT-supervised work units.

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Along with this shop-floor-level incorporation of workers into the ruling system, the KMT government approached labor unions in a similar manner. The CFL was granted a monopoly of national representation and functioned as a part of the party organization. The CFL was first organized in 1948 in Nanjing as a counterforce to the communist-dominated national union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). It was transplanted to Taiwan when the KMT retreated to the island in 1949 ( J. Chu 2001, chapter 3). As a way to place the CFL under the party’s control, the KMT was directly involved in union finances and the elections of union leaders. The KMT provided most of the funding for the national union, amounting to more than two-thirds of the union’s total budget (Chen et al. 2003). Through the party branches in factories, the KMT controlled the nomination and election of union officials as well.11 These union officers, once elected, were further provided with seats in important government and party positions. It was a KMT practice to reserve a seat for the CFL president in the Legislative Yuan and in the party’s Central Standing Committee, the highest decision-making body of the party (Ho 2006).12 Through these practices, Taiwanese unions were able to gain experience in and access to policy-making processes. Another means of union subordination by the KMT was to use the CFL as an organizational network to establish “clientele” relations with workers, particularly to mobilize their votes in local elections. Even under martial law, the KMT did not prohibit electoral contestation altogether. It allowed local elections from the 1950s and onwards as a measure to incorporate the local Taiwanese and to stabilize its rule over the island. The official union organization was also mobilized in these electoral processes. The KMT candidates running in local elections drew CFL cadres into election campaigns and assigned them to muster the votes of union members. The testimony below, by a union leader who served as the General Secretary of the CFL, reveals the extent of the CFL’s integration into the KMT’s election activities (Interview TA12-1): The KMT regarded the CFL not as a trade union but as a vote-mobilizing machine for KMT candidates. Unionists were election campaigners in charge of their own districts. During election time, union cadres were busy persuading their coworkers to vote for a certain candidate.

Therefore, the KMT incorporated the official labor organization both at the leadership level and the workplace level. At the upper level, the KMT controlled the union leadership and finances and offered union leaders positions within government or party committees. At the lower level, union cadres were mobilized into the KMT’s local networks and election machines. In exchange for their participation in election campaigns, the union cadres were

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rewarded with opportunities for promotion, assignment in easy positions, or other perks and privileges in their workplaces (Ho 2007). Although the CFL may look like a twin of Korea’s FKTU, the examples discussed here attest that the extent of its incorporation into the authoritarian regime was more thorough, systematic, and undisrupted. As Tun-Jen Cheng’s description of a “quasi-Leninist state” implies (1989), the state–union relations in Taiwan resembled the ones more pervasively found in former socialist states. Such labor-control methods by the KMT to assimilate workers and unions into the ruling system were further embedded in an ethnic division between mainlanders and local Taiwanese. This ethnic divide was evident in educational opportunities, employment practices, and patterns of social mobility (Wang 2001; Ho 2007; Yang 2007). In an ethnographic study of Taiwanese workers, Hill Gates illustrates how ethnicity and social class coincided in Taiwan because of these differing opportunities. According to her observation, “in the early years of Nationalist rule in Taiwan, being a Mainlander gave one distinct advantage in getting government jobs, while being Taiwanese often sufficed for being fired from one” (1987, 55). Workers who were recruited as party members and union officers were primarily mainlanders or pro-KMT Taiwanese, and they enjoyed higher positions and better wages in their workplaces (Ho 2007). For upward mobility in the CFL and in its affiliated unions, party membership in the KMT was regarded as a prerequisite (Kleingartner and Peng 1991, 433). Within most SOEs, the practice of ethnic segregation was prevalent and evident in situations where the majority of native Taiwanese workers had been concentrated in low-paying, low-status positions in factories. According to a labor activist who has worked for an independent union (Interview TA11-M), For many Taiwanese workers in SOEs, the key issue was anti-KMT. The SOE managers were often KMT party officials, and they were the ones that placed the workers under discrimination and exploitation.

This sense of ethnic injustice experienced in and out of workplaces formed the core of Taiwanese workers’ consciousness. For workers, the persistent gap in status and income between “them” and mainlanders (and pro-KMT Taiwanese) was the most intolerable aspect of their everyday work experience. In their view, “workers had long been dominated by privileged mainlanders, corrupt party cadres, and overbearing supervisors” (Ho 2007, 177). Because of these experiences, many workers, along with other local Taiwanese, saw ethnicity as the dominant form of inequality in Taiwanese society. Therefore, democratization was envisioned by the Taiwanese as the ending of the KMT regime and the reinstatement of ethnic justice on the island (Yang 2007).

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In contrast to the 1970s in Korea, where the Park regime intensified its dictatorial rule, the same decade began to signal a gradual change in the authoritarian grip in Taiwan. The KMT government faced international isolation starting in the early 1970s with the succession of Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, and 1975 began to bring a shift in the nature of KMT rule.13 In 1971 Taiwan, the Republic of China (ROC), was expelled from the United Nations, and in the following year the United States recognized mainland China, the People’s Republic (PRC), as the sole legitimate government in China. In 1979 the United States officially switched its diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC. Under these circumstances, the KMT government saw the necessity to improve its position in foreign relations against the PRC by demonstrating the regime’s democratic image (Lee 1988). To reflect these political objectives, the government decided to promote union organizing and amended labor laws that had remained untouched since the 1920s. The Trade Union Law of 1929 was revised to lower the bar for union organizing from firms with more than fifty workers to firms with more than thirty workers. The KMT began to encourage workers to organize and join unions, particularly in SOEs. Amid this liberalizing atmosphere, the political opposition was also achieving gradual success in local elections. As pointed out earlier, the KMT did not block electoral competition altogether. Popular elections in pre-­democratized Taiwan were held at three levels (Tien 1996): • Elections for county magistrates, city mayors, and township chiefs (beginning in 1950). • Elections for members of the Taiwan Provincial Assembly, municipal councils of Taipei and Kaohsiung, and county and city councils (beginning in 1950 –1951). • Supplementary elections for members of the Legislative Yuan and the National Assembly (beginning in 1969, with eleven contested seats).14 The coexistence of martial law and local elections is quite exceptional under authoritarian regimes, and its political implications need further discussion. This constitutes an important theoretical component in explaining the unfolding of labor politics in democratized Taiwan because the political sequencing and opportunities offered by local elections have critically affected the formation and interactions of collective actors. The electoral experiences over four decades preceding Taiwan’s full democratization influenced the KMT itself, the development of political opposition, and the opposition’s relationship with labor movements. The implanted KMT first introduced ­local

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elections as a means to strengthen its ruling legitimacy, to infiltrate existing social organizations, and to incorporate the native Taiwanese (Lin 1998, chapter 5). In fact, these elections functioned as a mechanism to gauge the “voice” of the local Taiwanese and enabled the KMT to become adaptive to social demands and to learn to tolerate political opposition (Dickson 1997; Chao and Myers 2000). Although the KMT was largely successful in placing Taiwanese society under its tight control and infiltrating its social organizations, which included official labor unions, the limited electoral space offered at the local level became the area where challenges against its rule and dissatisfactions began to be expressed and organized. For political dissidents, local elections offered a breathing space through which they could formulate visions and strategies for democratic change. Political candidates who were critical of KMT domination first labeled themselves as the nonpartisan, nonfaction (wudang wupai) group. This was because no opposition party was legally allowed despite local elections being regularly held. Later, these politicians formed the dangwai (literally meaning “outside of the party,” i.e., non-KMT), which became the incipient organizational network of an opposition party, the DPP. The dangwai consisted of an alliance of two types of opposition activists in Taiwan: local politicians who shared a strong dissatisfaction with KMT rule and dissident intellectuals who envisioned the democratization of Taiwan and resulting social change (Rigger 2001, 17). By participating in local elections, these dangwai candidates gained electoral experience by learning to campaign effectively and moderate their demands in order to be successful in electoral races. The dangwai not only was a network of political candidates to coordinate electoral campaigns against KMT candidates, but it also eventually emerged as the central force in the pro-democracy movement. As the representative organization of democratic movements, dangwai activists framed their political program as restoring ethnic justice between mainland authoritarians and the oppressed natives. Since the 1970s, it was the dangwai that organized and built linkages with other movement actors, such as workers, students, women, and environmentalists, around this nativist Taiwanese identity (Fan 2000; Chen and Wong 2002; Ho 2003; Yang 2007). One faction within the dangwai, the New Tide Faction, was particularly more concerned about social issues, including organizing labor.15 In an effort to reach out to the working population, the New Tide Faction formed the Taiwan Labor Front (TLF) in 1984. The TLF is the oldest and the most wellknown labor-movement group outside of official unions in Taiwan. According to this organization’s brochure, the TLF began its organizational activities

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by providing free legal consultations for workers trying to claim their basic labor rights. It also promoted union organizing, workers’ education, and union networking to foster the development of a genuine labor movement in Taiwan.16 This alternative union activism outside of KMT control was called an independent labor movement (zizhu gonghui yundong) and was later organized into the second national center, the Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU). (This process will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.) A distinctive feature observed in Taiwan’s authoritarian legacy of labor control is the role of political parties and their relationships with workers and unions. On the one side, there was the KMT party, which dominated and penetrated into the official unions and SOE workplaces. The CFL was incorporated into the ruling party, which provided it monopoly status and union representation in the party and government positions. On the other side, there was the opposition party, which emerged as the focal force for democratization and which was deeply involved in the organization of democratic unions outside of the official KMT–CFL nexus. What undergirded this closeness between the dangwai and independent unionists was their shared understanding of the ethnic injustice imposed by the minority mainlander regime and its supporters. The differences in authoritarian opposition-control strategies have critically affected the formation and composition of democratic coalitions in Korea and Taiwan. Unlike Korea’s authoritarian legacy of exclusion and repression, which fostered radicalism and militancy within political opposition and the democratic labor movement, the continued provision of the electoral space in Taiwan promoted the formation of an opposition party and its emergence as the focal force for the democratization movement. Such differences in political conditions attest to the significance of political sequencing and opportunities in shaping the strategies and alliances for challenging collective actors. In clear contrast to the experience of democratic union movements in Korea, Taiwan’s union movement was formed and nurtured from its incipient stage with close ties to political parties. This legacy had an obvious influence on how union actors interpreted their political environments and what choices they made regarding their modes of interest articulation when they entered a democratic era.

Democratization and the Pro-Democracy Coalition The decade that preceded democratic transition in Korea was marked by an intensified military dictatorship under Park’s Yushin regime (1972 –1979), a

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popular uprising in Kwangju after Park’s assassination (May 1980), and the return of generals with Chun Doo Hwan’s military coup (December 1980 – 1987). The same decade in Taiwan witnessed gradual political liberalization and institutionalized subnational-level elections through which political opposition increased its presence in electoral politics.17 The succession to political power by Chiang Ching-kuo, a relatively soft authoritarian leader, and Americans’ diplomatic de-recognition of the ROC in the mid-1970s created conditions for political loosening in Taiwan. This section discusses the process of democratic transition in the late 1980s and analyzes the pro-­democracy coalition, particularly the relationship between political parties and unions, on this path for political transformation in Korea and Taiwan. Political parties and unions entered the democratic phase apart in Korea but close in Taiwan. Korean workers showed their pent-up grievances with strikes and street ­mobilization when political parties contested the newly opened presidential race. In Taiwan’s gradual transition into democratic politics, workers and the opposition party collaborated in expanding the political space. Democratic Transition in Korea The critical moment in democratic transition begins when the authoritarian regime accepts electoral contestation as the only legitimate way of gaining political power. This occurred in Korea in June 1987, when Chun Doo Hwan conceded to the resumption of direct presidential elections in addition to other political liberalization measures that included the release of prisoners of conscience and the guarantee of media freedom. This political concession was made possible by nationwide pro-democracy protests that had been snowballing from early 1987, if not before. Public discontent with the military regime was first expressed in the 1985 legislative election, which the authoritarian party (the Democratic Justice Party, or DJP) lost in popular votes but still remained as the majority party because of a disproportional element in the electoral system.18 The DJP earned 35.2 percent of popular votes but gained 53.6 percent of seats (148 of 272 seats), whereas two opposition parties together, the Democratic Korea Party and the New Korea Democratic Party, garnered 49 percent of votes but only 37 percent of seats (102 out of 272 seats) (data from the National Election Commission, accessed on March 31, 2009). This was an unexpected result for the Chun Doo Hwan regime, which disproportionately benefited from the privileges of electoral rules in addition to electoral fraud and vote-buying practices (Park 2002). Another source of public fury was authoritarians’ reliance on brutal oppression of political dissenters, particularly college students and critical

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i­ntellectuals. The torture/killing of student activist Park Jong-cheol by an anticommunist task force in January 1987 dealt a fatal blow to the already tainted political legitimacy of the military regime. Finally, Chun Doo Hwan’s April decision to ban any discussion on constitutional revisions, which would allow an elected presidency, ignited the momentum for popular protests. In the following months, street demonstrations spread nationwide and across class lines with demands for the restoration of democracy and human rights. The protests expanded to include the support and participation of many whitecollar workers and ordinary citizens. On June 29 the government conceded and announced its intention to resume electoral democracy, particularly by scheduling a democratic presidential election in December. The political coalition that was at the heart of this pro-democracy movement was the National Center for Democratic Constitution (Gukbon), in which dissident intellectuals, opposition parties, religious groups, and college students participated. However, despite the fact that pro-democracy groups, most notably college students, had been the major force in this popular resistance to end the military rule, they were excluded from the actual bargaining process for democratic reform. Only the opposition-party leaders were included in the negotiations with outgoing authoritarians over the rewriting of the Constitution and changes in electoral rules (Cho 1998). Moreover, with the democratic opportunity caused by the presidential race, these opposition parties were soon preoccupied with rivalry over presidential candidates. Therefore, the pro-democracy coalition that was formed in 1987 to end authoritarian rule was short-lived and soon bifurcated into opposition parties taking an electoral path and the rest (college students, industrial workers, and other minjung-oriented groups) taking a social-movement path. When the authoritarian government allowed a political liberalization program, workers’ protests began to surge throughout the major industrial towns in the months from July to September of 1987. During this period of the Workers’ Great Struggle, about 2.7 million workers in 4,000 union and nonunion shop floors participated in a variety of collective actions, including sitins, strikes, rallies, and street demonstrations (Cho 1998, 275 –76). More than 1,300 new unions were formed by the end of 1987, marking a 50 percent increase in the number of existing unions (2,658 unions in 1986, data from the Ministry of Labor, accessed on March 31, 2006). The number of unionized workers increased from 1.3 million in 1987 to 1.9 million two years later and then gradually decreased thereafter (ibid.). Labor unrest was most intense in the towns of Ulsan, Masan-Changwon, and Busan, where heavy industries were concentrated. Union organizing and collective actions went beyond the

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industrial sector to include white-collar workers in schools, banks, hospitals, and mass media. This was an unprecedented upsurge of workers’ collective action, which revealed the extent of their subjugation under authoritarian rule and their potential power as a collective actor under a democratic political system. However, all this popular fervor for democracy failed to bring political opposition to power in the restored presidential election in December. The political opposition was divided: Kim Young Sam, who represented the Gyeongsang region, and Kim Dae Jung, who ran on behalf of the Jeolla region. Thanks to this uncompromising rivalry within the opposition, it was Roh Tae Woo, Chun’s authoritarian successor, who won the race with 36.6 percent of the popular vote.19 In the legislative election of spring 1988, three opposition parties were together able to form a majority in the National Assembly. However, this opposition victory was soon thwarted and replaced by a conservative majority when the authoritarian party (the DJP) absorbed two major opposition parties and formed the Democratic Liberal Party in 1990. As briefly surveyed here, democratic transition in Korea was brought about by nationwide popular protests followed by industrial workers’ mobilization. However, a divided political opposition allowed an authoritarian successor to capture the fruit of the hard-won presidential election and remain in power for another five years. The coalition between opposition politicians and prodemocracy movement groups during the transition period did not last long and split into separate paths because of this division and the associated failure in the 1987 presidential election. Opposition parties continued drifting along with presidential candidates and regional lines. An opportunity that could have linked workers’ political energies to opposition parties during this fluid period of political change was lost. Pro-democracy movement groups distanced themselves from divisive party politics and emerged as an effective alternative force in democratized Korea (Choi 2002; Shin 2006). Democratic labor unions were formed either independently or with support from the democracy movement but had no involvement with partisan politics. Democratic Transition in Taiwan Taiwan’s democratic transition began in 1986 with Chiang Ching-kuo’s announcement that the KMT government would launch major political reforms. Although the process was less dramatic than the transition politics in Korea, it involved student protests for constitutional reform and workers’ mobilization to address their long-suppressed grievances. Yet the most salient force that precipitated this political opening was the electoral ascendance of political

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opposition in various levels of elections that reflected the increasing popular discontent with the KMT rule. As already discussed, the authoritarian regime in Taiwan did allow political contestation at local levels, and this subnational electoral space aided the representation of political forces critical of the KMT. The election results of various local levels attest that popular discontent against the KMT rule was significantly present. The regime opponents, broadly aligned as the non-KMT group, were able to advance to public office by commanding sizable support in local elections. In the period between 1951 and 1989, non-KMT candidates were able to advance to the Taiwan Provincial Assembly in the range of 24.5 to 37.8 percent of the seats, to the county magistrates and city mayors in the range of 21.4 to 47.3 percent, and to the county and city councilors in the range of 16.2 to 39.7 percent (Liu 1992). In addition, non-KMT politicians fared increasingly well in supplementary legislative elections at the expense of declining support for the KMT candidates.20 As shown in Figure  3.1, non-KMT candidates expanded their vote shares from 24 percent in 1969 to 40.8 percent in 1989, when supplementary elections for the Legislative Yuan were held. In the 1989 election, the DPP alone was able to garner 29.2 percent of the popular vote. These electoral

KMT

Non-KMT

Dangwai/DPP

90 80

76

70

73.1

77.6 71.9

69.4

66.7

60

59.2 52.5 47.5

50 40.8

40 30 20

24

28.1

26.9 22.4

30.6

33.3

29.2

30.8

24.5 18.9

13

10 0 1969

1972

1975

1980

1983

1986

1989

1992

3.1  Votes for the KMT and opposition in supplementary legislative elections, 1969 –1992 (in percentages)

figure

s o u rc e :

Data from the Taiwan Central Election Commission (2006). Non-KMT includes all candidates who ran as nonpartisan (including the dangwai candidates) because the KMT regime did not allow opposition parties. note:

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contestations obviously promoted the democratic experiences of citizens and political elites in Taiwan. Citizens turned into sophisticated voters to voice their grievances in electoral spaces while the KMT was able to gauge popular sentiment and learned to tolerate political opposition (Chao and Myers 2000, 401). It was under these circumstances that the DPP evolved into an effective alternative political force for the native Taiwanese people. With Chiang’s signaling for political loosening, the dangwai politicians declared the formal organization of the Democratic Progressive Party in 1986. Although this action was in direct contravention of the existing ban against the formation of opposition parties, Chiang tacitly allowed the existence of the new party. Soon, martial law was lifted in 1987, paving the way for further political reform in Taiwan. Amid this liberalizing atmosphere, labor disputes began to increase in the late 1980s. When the KMT promulgated the Labor Standard Law in 1984 and established the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) within the Executive Yuan in 1987, workers’ grievances that had long been accumulated under the martial law era began to explode. Labor disputes erupted in textile factories and transportation companies, where workers demanded the payment of overdue wages, overtime compensation, year-end bonuses, and other labor rights stipulated in the labor law but not honored by management ( J. Chu 2001, ­chapter 3). Although the magnitude and scale of labor protests were not comparable to Korea’s Workers’ Great Struggle, the wildcat strikes that occurred outside the realm of the CFL unions were groundbreaking for Taiwanese labor. Workers in the hundreds or even thousands demonstrated and waged strikes in companies such as Wen Mei Corporation, Ford Lio-Ho Motor Company, China Petroleum, Taiwan Power, Nestlé, Far East Textile Company, and Miaoli Bus Corporation (Kleingartner and Peng 1991, 437– 38). Independent unionists and labor groups asked for the actual implementation of the Labor Standard Law by framing their demands in the language of “Fight for what the law offers” (Chen and Wong 2002, 65). Labor law became a tool for labor unions to enhance the legitimacy of their collective claims and to engage in campaigns against the KMT regime. Labor activists also focused on expanding unions by organizing nonunion workers (particularly in the private sector) or seizing control of KMT-­ sponsored unions. As in the experience of democratizing Korea, the number of unionized workers in Taiwan increased from 2.1 million in 1987 to more than 3 million five years later (data from the Council of Labor Affairs, accessed on March 31, 2006). The number of unions also peaked at 3,700 in the same period (ibid.).

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When Chiang Ching-kuo passed away, in 1988, and political power was transferred to Lee Teng-hui, the democratization process slowed despite the lifting of martial law. In the spring of 1990, college students stepped in and mobilized demonstrations demanding the expansion of democratic elections to the presidency and the entire Legislative Yuan. The KMT leadership was split between conservatives and reformers and brought a hazy halt to the prospect for further democratization. Thousands of students staged sit-in rallies and asked Lee Teng-hui to provide a blueprint for a constitutional revision and a schedule for political reform (Wright 1999). In 1991, with the growing pressure for democratic representation, the Council of Grand Justices (equivalent to a constitutional court) ordered all the senior members of the Legislative Yuan to resign. The Constitution was amended in 1991 for the first time since 1947 to institute a complete direct election of the Legislative Yuan, to be held in 1992.21 It was revised again in 1994 to set the institutional rules for a direct election of the president and vice president, to be held in 1996.22 With these institutional changes, Taiwan’s democratic transition was complete. The DPP and other pro-democracy forces (college students, independent unionists, critical intellectuals, women, and environmental activists) cooperated in their mission to expand the democratic space. On the one hand, the DPP was deeply involved in assisting in the organization of newly emerging movements involving labor, women, and the environment (Fan 2000). On the other hand, these various activists aided the DPP candidates running in the first-ever democratic legislative election, in 1992. Although the KMT was able to maintain a majority (52.5 percent of votes and 95 seats) in the race for the 161-seat Legislative Yuan, it was by a slim margin, with the opposition emerging as a formidable challenging force with 47.5 percent of votes and 66 seats (see Figure 3.1). The first presidential election in 1996 was won by Lee Teng-hui, the KMT’s presidential candidate. When comparing the process of democratic transition in Korea and Taiwan, the most distinctive difference is found in the sequencing of electoral opening (i.e., at which level electoral competition began to be introduced in each polity) and its effect on the composition of democratic coalitions. As summarized in Table 3.2, electoral competition in Korea moved from the presidency and the National Assembly to local-level offices, whereas Taiwan’s democratic transition was built upon the already existing local elections. With the end of martial law, in 1987, electoral contestation expanded to the national legislature and the presidential office. In Korea the presidential election of 1987 and the legislative elections in the following year are regarded as the founding elections of democratization.

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ta b l e 3 . 2

Elections in Korea and Taiwan Regime Type Korea

Authoritarian

Legislative–National 1948, 1950, 1954, 1958, 1960, 1963, 1967, 1971, 1973, 1978, 1981, 1985 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008

Authoritarian

None

Democratic

1996, 2000, 2004, 2008

1947, 1969, 1972, 1975, 1980, 1983, 1986 1989, 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2008

Democratic Taiwan

Presidential 1952, 1956, 1960, 1963, 1967, 1971 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, 2007

Subnational 1952, 1956, 1960 1991, 1995, 1998, 2002, 2006 Since 1950 Continued

s o u r c e s : Data from the Korea National Election Commission and the Taiwan Central Election Commission, accessed on February 15, 2009. n o t e s : Shaded years (…..) indicate the year of the first genuine democratic election for each category. In 1948 and 1960, the National Assembly appointed the president in Korea. From 1972 to 1981, Korean presidents were elected by an electoral college mostly made up of the associates of the military regime. In the 1989 Legislative Yuan election, only 101 seats were contested.

National legislative elections were held under authoritarian regimes, but the National Assembly formed by these elections was often dismissed by military coups. Legislative elections marred by irregularities and massive fraud failed to serve as a stable political institution in pre-transition Korea (Im 2010). Local elections, on the other hand, had been halted from 1961 until their restoration in the mid-1990s. Although local council representatives began to be elected by popular vote beginning in 1991, elections for the heads of various subnational administrations were further delayed to 1995. This sequencing of electoral opportunities from presidential to local levels made Korea’s posttransition politics highly centralized around the presidential office and its contenders: Political parties were formed or split around individual politicians who were ambitious to run in presidential races. This contributed to weakening the organizational stability of Korean parties that operate around presidential hopefuls, not around policy programs (an in-depth discussion appears in Chapter 4). As such, opposition politicians and pro-democracy groups that had cooperated for democratic transition were often divided along the lines of different presidential contenders. Eventually, political parties and labor unions came to take separate paths without considering each other as coalitional partners. In Taiwan, the course of electoral competition was reversed by expanding from local to presidential levels. Local elections (for village heads; township chiefs; county magistrates; city mayors; township-, county-, and city-level councils; and provincial assemblies) continued to be held regularly even under

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martial law, whereas the first genuine parliamentary election took place in 1992. The president and vice president, who had been indirectly selected by the National Assembly23 until the constitutional amendment of 1994, were elected by the general populace for the first time in 1996. Continued electoral opportunities at the local level enabled moderate political opposition such as the dangwai politicians to emerge as viable alternatives to lead the democratization process. Furthermore, local elections created a schism between the central government and local administrations that pro-democracy forces could take advantage of. The DPP and other democracy groups worked together for the strategy of “encircling the central by the local” to eventually win the national elections in the coming years (Ho 2006). And labor unions were obvious partners in the opposition party’s strategy. This chapter discusses the impact of authoritarian legacies on labor unions by focusing on authoritarians’ control strategies and their influence on labor actors’ perceptions and capacities when they entered a democratic phase in the late 1980s. It focuses on examining the relationship between labor unions and other collective actors and how this political coalition has shaped the development of newly emerging labor movements. The overall orientation of post–Korean War authoritarians in South Korea was to build a political alliance with domestic capitalists while excluding labor and suppressing political opposition. The FKTU was placed under government control and patronage, while union activism outside of this official structure was suppressed by labor laws and security apparatuses. The severity of political exclusion and despotic labor practices at workplaces not only radicalized workers’ grievances but also drew critical intellectuals, college students, and religious groups into labor mobilization. These social forces formed the backbone of Korea’s prodemocracy coalition, which projected a radical vision of democratization in which labor rights constituted an important component. A distinctive feature observed in Taiwan’s authoritarian legacy of labor control is the regime’s incorporation of labor unions and a similar relationship emerging between political opposition and new unionists. On one side, the KMT party dominated and penetrated into the official unions and SOE workplaces. On the other side, the opposition party emerged as the focal force for democratization and was deeply involved in the organization of democratic unions outside of the official KMT–CFL nexus. What undergirded this closeness between the dangwai and independent unionists was their shared understanding of the ethnic injustices imposed by the minority mainlander regime and its supporters.

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The differences in authoritarian opposition-control strategies have critically affected the formation and composition of democratic coalitions in Korea and Taiwan. Unlike Korea’s authoritarian legacy of exclusion and repression, which fostered radicalism and militancy within the political opposition and the democratic labor movement, the continued provision of electoral space in Taiwan promoted the formation of moderate political opposition such as the election-oriented dangwai group and its emergence into the focal force of the democratization movement. The sequencing of electoral openings in the process of democratization further reinforced these differences. Korea’s path from presidential to local elections made the new democratic politics highly centralized around the presidency, with the consequence of weakening political parties. Under such institutional conditions, the distance between labor unions and formal politics was reiterated. In Taiwan, however, the transition phase involved continued local elections expanding to presidential contestation. Taiwan’s union movement was not only formed and fostered from its incipient stage within close ties with political parties, but continued to cooperate with them by taking advantage of given electoral spaces. These distinctive relationships between organized labor and political parties, distant in Korea and close in Taiwan, were clearly reinforcing factors in the process of democratic transition politics.

4

Labor Unions and Political Parties in Democratized Korea and Taiwan

How desperately did we wish if we had one single politician to represent our voice in our moments of hardship, suffering, and death. . . . Daan Byeongho, Korean unionist-turned-politician1

This chapter discusses the central argument of this study: The linkages between political parties and labor unions have critically shaped the nature of labor politics in Korea and Taiwan. This argument is premised on the basic expectation that political parties operate as the principal agents that articulate, aggregate, and represent varying social interests in a liberal democratic system. Here the discussion focuses on (1) describing the patterns of political party–union linkages in democratized Korea and Taiwan and (2) explaining the conditions that aided the formation of these partisan relations. Political party–union linkages are examined by looking at the process of organizational development of these collective actors, labor’s representation among elected politicians, and workers’ voting behavior in presidential and legislative elections. Mutual interactions in the organizational development of labor unions and political parties, a significant share of labor’s representation among the party’s legislators, and workers’ voting for their partisan ally are examined as indicators of party–union linkages. Such partisan relations are enabled when there is a party that represents labor interests (in other words, the political divisions that political parties capitalize on are overlapping with labor issues) and when this pro-labor party is organizationally stable and electorally effective to be a ruling party or a partner in the ruling coalition. In democratized Korea, labor unions and political parties followed separate paths. Although the conservative FKTU maintained a loose relation with whichever party became the incumbent, the most vocal democratic unions developed independently from any political parties. Labor’s ­representation in

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national politics was minimal: In the last twenty years less than 2 percent of all elected legislators had a career background in labor. Workers’ votes did not show any loyal support to existing parties and their candidates. Partisan relations failed to be formed because there was no political party that represented labor agendas until unions themselves formed the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in 2000. The major political division that dominated party competition was regionalism, which resulted in cross-­cutting labor issues and dividing workers’ votes. Korean political parties, including opposition parties on the liberal side, have been institutionally ­unstable ­because of splits and mergers and were consequently considered to be feeble organizations for building partisan relations with labor. The DLP, which was organized with the support of democratic unions, has not yet turned into an effective political channel for labor owing to its modest success in recent elections. In short, the interests of Korean workers found no political representation in the democratic system, and union actors remained as outsiders, forced to take their issues to the streets. In Taiwan, partisan linkages between political parties and labor unions have become a political norm. The conservative CFL is tied to the KMT, whereas the TCTU is linked to the DPP. From the incipient stage, democratic unions and the DPP have mutually developed. Both the DPP and the KMT allocated a significant number of seats to legislators with labor backgrounds in an effort to show their interest in labor issues. Workers responded by casting their votes along their partisan lines. Such close cooperation between political parties and labor unions was made possible by the predominant political division of ethnic identity, which overlapped with workers’ grievances. Moreover, both the KMT and the DPP have been organizationally stable and effective parties. The TCTU unionists who identified their grievances as ethnic injustices saw their interests as being especially represented by the DPP, a formidable opposition party soon to capture the presidency in 2000 and the Legislative Yuan in 2001. Although the DPP is not a pro-labor party in the strict sense, for democratic unions it was the party that provided access to both local and national policy-making institutions. As a result, unions in Taiwan became insiders in the formal political process with the aid of political parties.

Democratization and the Relationship Between Political Parties and Unions In democratized Korea and Taiwan, some features of labor unions were maintained while others diverged. The relationships among the ruling parties

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and official unions that shared similar features before the democratic opening in the late 1980s were largely sustained. The FKTU, which had previously been placed under the political control of authoritarian regimes, continued to seek partisan relations with the president in power (regardless of party ideology or policy position) and participate in the newly created Korea Tripartite Commission. Taiwan’s CFL, which had been incorporated into the KMT regime, stayed within its partisan tutelage. However, in the course of democratization, the new national confederations, primarily made up of the newly formed democratic unions, developed divergent relations with political parties. In Korea the KCTU remained detached from established parties and instead chose to organize its own political party, the DLP, in 2000. In Taiwan the TCTU not only developed with organizational support from the DPP, but it also continued to rely on these partisan ties to pursue its interests. Political Parties and Unions in Korea In democratized Korea the monopoly of the conservative FKTU began to be seriously challenged by the emergence of democratic unions on shop floors and finally by the establishment of the KCTU in 1995 (the formation of the KCTU will be discussed in detail in Chapter  5). The FKTU continued to maintain its status by seeking political alliance with presidents in power or by participating in consultative bodies such as the Korea Tripartite Commission (KTC), established in 1998. Facing the growing strength of democratic unions, the leadership in the FKTU believed that “their comparative advantage lay in ties with established political forces” (Interview KA40-1). For instance, the FKTU announced a policy alliance with president Kim Dae Jung (from the liberal camp) in 1997 and with president Lee Myung Bak (from the conservative camp) in 2007.2 However, the nature of this alliance was neither fully partisan nor organizational because it was more of a leadership-level declaration to endorse a specific presidential candidate (Interview KA40-1). Yet the FKTU’s continued relations with the ruling party or the incumbent president are associated with the unions’ past experiences with authoritarian regimes. Rewarding labor quiescence with preferential treatment was a familiar strategy for the FKTU, particularly for the union leaders who had been placed under government co-optation for the past several decades. It was only in the late 1990s that the FKTU occasionally joined the KCTU’s confrontational mobilization when the government introduced massive restructuring schemes in the workplaces of their member unions. On the other hand, the relationship between the KCTU and established parties has been distant, if not hostile. KCTU unionists experienced not only

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severe repression under democratically elected governments but also feeble opposition parties with little interest in labor issues. These unionists were organized independently from established parties, and their political motto of “independent democratic unionism” in the 1980s was sustained throughout the democratic era. Furthermore, having witnessed the historical experience of the FKTU’s political subjugation, the KCTU activists placed more emphasis on strengthening the labor union itself rather than building political alliances with established parties. According to a labor activist (Interview KA10-M), Korean unionists, in a way, made a critical decision about their political strategy during the transition politics. Witnessing the strength of spontaneous mobilization of workers during the Workers’ Great Struggle in 1987, movement leaders decided that it was the union organization, not existing political parties, which was going to be the major vehicle for labor movements in Korea.

During the early years of democratization, Korean labor activists experienced the power of spontaneous mobilization to enhance their economic and political rights. At the same time, the democratically formed governments under Roh Tae Woo (1988 –1992) and Kim Young Sam (1993 –1997) continued policies to tame organized labor. Even lawful strike activities were often met by police crackdowns that were followed by the arrests of union leaders. According to figures compiled by the KCTU in terms of the number of workers who died, were sacked from workplaces, or were imprisoned because of their involvement in union activism, the political hostility that the newly rising unionists faced was tremendous. Under the first democratically elected government, 45 workers died, 1,150 workers lost their jobs, and 1,974  workers were imprisoned because of their participation in the labor movement (KCTU 2001, 325 – 487). Even under subsequent governments, these numbers remained at several hundred, reflecting the extent of militant confrontation between union activists and the national government. In addition to these bitter experiences under democratic governments, newly emerging labor unions did not have any political party interested in taking labor issues into formal political processes. Regionalism dominated party competition in democratized Korea, and oppositional parties did not build any systematic linkages with union actors. Democratic unions developed independently from the influence of or support from political parties. Such a distance between unions and parties was most evident in the paucity of lawmakers with labor backgrounds in the national legislature. If unions and parties were closely related, the party would have a certain number of legislators to represent labor in national politics.

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ta b l e 4 . 1

National legislators’ career backgrounds in Korea and Taiwan: 1988 –2008 (percentages in parentheses) Career Background Politics Bureaucracy Business Law Journalism Education Local politics Social movement/civic activism Labor union Military/police Aborigine Other Unreported/missing data Total

Korea 667 (37.9) 157 (8.9) 168 (9.6) 163 (9.3) 110 (6.3) 112 (6.4) 150 (8.5) 62 (3.5) 25 (1.4) or 34 (1.9) 60 (3.4) — 82 (4.7) 2 (0.1) 1,759 (100)

Taiwan 272 (24.2) 29 (2.6) 62 (5.5) 37 (3.3) 47 (4.2) 157 (14) 255 (22.7) 69 (6.1) 39 (3.7) 28 (2.5) 16 (1.4) 89 (7.9) 24 (2.1) 1,125 (100)

s o u r c e s : Data from the Korea National Election Commission, National Legislative Election Report (KNEC, various years) and the Taiwan Legislative Yuan, accessed from June to August 2009. n o t e : The details of the coding are summarized in Appendix B. (The coding of Taiwanese legislators was assisted by Edward Hsu, graduate student in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California–San Diego, in June 2009.)

Table 4.1 summarizes the career background of lawmakers elected in the past six national legislative elections in Korea and Taiwan. In the case of Korea, only 1.4 percent (25 out of a total of 1,759 legislators) of all legislators in the past twenty years of democratic politics have had a career background in labor. Even if a more generous criterion is used in coding “labor legislators” to include all the lawmakers from the DLP, the proportion adds up to 1.9 percent. Such an absence of labor representation is contrasted by the relatively high proportion (9.6 percent, 168 out of a total of 1,759 legislators) of lawmakers who come from the business sector. Interestingly, due to the traditional ties with the FKTU, the conservative parties (the Democratic Justice Party, the Democratic Liberal Party, the New Korea Party, the Grand National Party, and the New Democratic Republican Party) had more labor legislators (10 in total) than the liberal parties (all the other parties except the DLP, 6 in total). These numbers illustrate the extent to which labor found no formal representation in national politics in democratized Korea. The lack of linkages between unions and parties can be further traced in workers’ voting behaviors. Postelection surveys show that voters identifying themselves in the social category of “working class” did not cast their ballots in any distinctive patterns. As summarized in Table 4.2, workers’ votes are spread among the conservative and liberal parties depending on the vot-

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ta b l e 4 . 2

Absence of class voting in Korea: 1992 –2004 (percentage of votes) 1992 NA

DLiP

Workers National AVR

44 39

1992 PR Workers National AVR 1997 PR Workers National AVR 2000 NA Workers National AVR

DP

RNP

Other

32.7 33.6

13.8 14.8

  9.4 12.6

Kim Young Sam Kim Dae Jung Jeong Ju Young

Total Number 159 994

Other

Total Number

15.1   9.1

  218 1052

43.6 41.4

27.5 33.4

13.8 16.1

Lee Hoi Chang

Kim Dae Jung

Lee In Je

34.5 34.2

38 40.4

27.4 25.3

0.9 1.2

MDP

ULD

DLP

Total Number

8.3 7.2

1.3 2.3

  226 1840

GNP 41.6 40.4

33.1   37.7

Kwon Yong Gil Total Number 120 905

Lee Hoi Chang

Roh Moo Hyun

Kwon Yong Gil

Other

Total Number

Workers National AVR

33.2 46.2

53.2 48.5

3.4 3.9

10.2 1.4

1820

2004 NA

GNP

Uri

DP

DLP

Total Number

Workers National AVR

30.6 35.8

47.6 38.3

6.7 7.1

14.6 13

  147 1114

2002 PR

s o u r c e s : Data from the Korea Election Research Institute’s postelection surveys (various years) and Shin Gwang-yeong’s 2003 Worker Survey data. n o t e s : NA  National Assembly elections; PR  presidential elections; DLiP  Democratic Liberal Party; DP  Democratic Party; RNP  Reunification National Party; ULD  United Liberal Democrats; GNP  Grand National Party; MDP  Millennium Democratic Party; DLP  Democratic Labor Party; Uri  Open Uri Party.

ers’ regional attachments in a proportion similar to that of the national averages. Regional divisions that have characterized party competition in Korea’s ­post-transition elections have functioned as cross-cutting divisions rather than reinforcing divisions in orienting the votes from the working population. It is particularly noteworthy that Korean workers have voted more for conservative parties and less for liberal parties than the national averages. Only in the presidential election of 2002 did workers cast more ballots than the national average for Roh Moo Hyun, a candidate known for his pro-labor stance. Yet labor votes have been divided along regional party lines. The large industrial complexes are mostly located in the Gyeongsang region (Busan, Masan-Changwon, Pohang, and Ulsan), and the majority of workers are recruited from the same region. These Gyeongsang workers tend to vote for conservative parties that represent their regional interests, whereas workers

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who come from the Jeolla region (about 15 percent of workers in the industrial towns) tend to vote for the party associated with Kim Dae Jung.3 Even after the formation of the DLP, in 2000, workers’ ballots did not all go to this labor party. According to a postelection survey of 1,024 KCTU members, only 36.8 percent of the most militant workers voted for Kwon Yong Gil, the DLP’s presidential candidate and former KCTU chairperson. These unionists cast 47.4 percent and 11.1 percent of their ballots for Roh Moo Hyun and Lee Hoi Chang, respectively (Labor and the World 2003). Such an absence of partisan voting among Korean workers reflects the failure of political parties to build systematic relations with the working people and to represent labor issues in party competition. It also shows that a labor party such as the DLP needs time to become an effective political alternative for its own sectoral constituency. Why did political parties fail to develop partisan relations with workers and unions when electoral competition in democratized Korea increased the necessity to attract voters? This underdevelopment of partisan relations between parties and unions can be explained by the nature of political divisions and the degree of party institutionalization. If we understand social divisions as “divides that are durable to entrap individuals in certain social locations” and political divisions as “group divides that are mapped onto party alternatives” (Kitschelt 2001, 154), not all social divisions materialize into political cleavages. The dominant political division of pro-democracy versus status quo (i.e., authoritarianism) before democratization is expected to be replaced by new divisions in post-transition elections (Moreno 1999). In Korea’s post1987 elections, left–right divisions, or progressive– conservative divisions in more moderate terms, did not develop into party competition until 2000, when the labor party entered the electoral landscape. The new political division that split political parties was regionalism, which was cross-cutting with distributional issues. Regionalism in the Korean context is understood as the tendency to support politicians or parties that represent voters’ native regions (Lee 1998, 20). The predominance of regionalism in defining party competition meant not only that workers did lack a political party to represent labor interests but also that their votes were divided along their regional attachments. The primary reason for the rise of regional divisions was the presence of indoctrinated anticommunism in South Korea. Forming political parties along the left–right dimensions had been severely discouraged because of the peninsula’s division into two Koreas in 1953. Although it is obvious that the Korean War and the existence of a communist North Korea paralyzed the

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ideological spectrum of many South Koreans, it was the authoritarian regimes that imposed a strong anticommunist ideology, suppressing every attempt to mobilize leftist political agendas.4 The military elites used security dictates to justify such repressive measures against left-leaning parties. Under these circumstances, political parties could not be organized along differences in socioeconomic divisions or policy programs (Lee 1998; Lim 2009). The resumption of electoral competition in 1987 did not significantly alter the situation. The fading out of the democracy-versus-authoritarianism division was replaced by regionalism as the prime division to mobilize votes in elections (G. Cho 1996; Lee 1998).5 In the first post-transition presidential election of 1987, the four candidates, Roh Tae Woo, Kim Young Sam, Kim Dae Jung, and Kim Jong Pil, all gained predominant support from their home regions.6 In the following 1988 National Assembly election as well, Roh’s Democratic Justice Party, Kim Young Sam’s Reunification Democratic Party, Kim Dae Jung’s Party for Peace and Democracy, and Kim Jong Pil’s New Democratic Republican Party received strong support from their party bosses’ native regions. Since these founding elections, party leaders’ regional backgrounds have strongly influenced voters’ party choice, consequently creating a “regional party” system in which political parties draw their support bases from and monopolize their native regions, most notably the Gyeongsang, Jeolla, and Chungcheong provinces. Appealing to regionalism was a cost-effective strategy for political parties in mobilizing voters. Although couched in a broad language of pro-­democracy versus authoritarianism, opposition politicians represented regional interests and grievances created by the developmental state, which favored one region over others.7 However, regionalistic competition created negative effects for the development of party politics in Korea. It discouraged the need for political parties to develop a coherent platform of policy programs and to compete on those terms because they could simply appeal to regional ties with promises of pork-barrel handouts. In addition to the absence of programmatic competition among political parties, which would have offered political alternatives to workers/voters, Korean political parties have remained under-institutionalized, which keeps them from being viable partisan allies for labor unions (Lee 2009). If institutionalization refers to “a process by which a practice or organization becomes well-established and widely known,” political actors develop expectations, orientations, and behaviors around the institutionalized organizations and norms (Mainwaring 1999, 25). Party institutionalization is an important concept in gauging the stability and effectiveness of political parties as agencies

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for public representation and electoral accountability in a democratic polity.8 Political parties are regarded as being institutionalized when the same parties run in several consecutive elections, when parties are rooted in society with systematic links to social organizations, and when party organization is developed to resolve the social-choice problem and exercise party discipline (Mainwaring 1999; Cheng 2003). According to these party institutionalization criteria, Korean political parties remain under-institutionalized despite democratic experiences that have spanned two decades. As Figure 4.1 shows, Korean political parties have engaged in constant reshuffling by repeated splits and mergers. Parties on both the conservative and liberal sides have shown a similar level of organizational instability. For Korean unions, these inchoate and shallow political parties could not be regarded as stable and reliable agents for the representation of labor interests: Unstable organizations make it hard for actors to develop consistent expectations and pledge credible commitments. Table 4.3 summarizes and compares the degree of party institutionalization in post-transition Korea and Taiwan. In Korea few parties have kept the same party name between elections because of their engagement in constant dissolution and reorganization. Nineteen different parties (with more than 5 percent of national votes) appeared in the last six legislative elections, and each party had an average longevity of 4.4 years. As illustrated in Figure 4.1, Korean political parties undergo repeated frequent mergers and splits. None of the parties that competed in the first round of democratic elections in 1987–1988 kept their names until the following election. Furthermore, many ­Korean voters, as well as social organizations, remain independent, with no systematic partisan affiliations. Although each political party has a standing central committee as its formal decision-making body, the short life span of these parties inhibits the development of internal rules and organizations to routinize intraparty procedures. Most of the internal decisions, including candidate selections, are often made in an ad hoc manner by party leaders or by each party’s presidential candidates (Choi 2002; Fell 2005; Interview KP46-1). In contrast, Taiwanese political parties have shown a remarkable stability in the post-transition period. Although there have been several new parties that have splintered off from the KMT and the DPP since the expansion of electoral contestation in the early 1990s, these two parties have stayed as main competitors within two broader party blocks. The average longevity of political parties in Taiwan is more than thirty-two years. This high average is due to the KMT Party, which was established in 1894. When an alternative measure is used to minimize the effect of this “outlier,” the median of party ­longevity

Labor Unions and Political Parties

82 New Democratic Republican Party(1987)

PR 1987

Reunification Democratic Party (1987)

Democratic Justice Party (1981)

Party for Peace and Democracy (1987) Hakyoreh Party* (1988)

NA 1988 Democratic Liberal Party (1990)

United Liberal Democrats (1995)

NA 1996

New Korea Party (1996)

Grand National Party (1997)

PR 1997

Democratic Party (1991) Reunification National Party* (1992)

PR/NA 1992

People’s Party* (1988)

National Congress for New Politics (1995)

Democratic Party* (1995)

People Victory 21* (1997)

New National Party* (1997) Millennium Democratic Party (2000)

NA 2000

Democratic Labor Party (2000)

PR 2002

NA 2004

ULD

GNP

Pro-Park Solidarity (2008)

GNP

Democratic Party (2003)

Uri Party (2003)

DLP

PR 2007

NA 2008

figure

Liberal Progressive Party (2008)

United Democratic Party (2008)

Creative Korea Party (2008)

DLP

Progressive New Party (2008)

4.1  Political parties in democratic Korea

notes:

PR  presidential elections; NA  National Assembly elections. The year of party establishment is in parentheses. A solid line ( __ )  party continuation. An arrow (→)  party merger or split. An asterisk (*)  party dissolution.

in Taiwan becomes fourteen years, which is still much longer than the Korean average. Moreover, Taiwanese voters and their occupational/sectoral organizations have sustained partisan affiliation with either the KMT or the DPP. Both parties have developed stable procedures for making internal decisions. In particular, the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system that had been used until 2004 required a high level of coordination within a party and necessitated the development of intra-party decision-making procedures.9

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ta b l e 4 . 3

Party institutionalization in Korea and Taiwan Number of parties Party longevity Social linkages Party organization

Korea

Taiwan

19 83/19  4.4 years Weak Low-medium

5 113/5  32.2 years Medium Medium

s o u r c e s : Data from the Korea National Election Commission and the Taiwan Central Election Commission, accessed on February 15, 2009. n o t e s : 1. There have been six national legislative elections in each country between 1987 and 2008: Korea— in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008; Taiwan—1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, and 2007. 2. Number of parties: Parties that gained more than 5 percent of votes in national legislative elections from 1987 to 2008. 3. Party longevity: The average years of party existence by adding years from the party establishment to its demise and dividing it by the total number of parties. 4. Social linkages: Based on percentage of voters who were listed as independent in the 1997 Korean Presidential Election Survey (1,207 respondents) and in the 1996 Taiwanese Presidential Election Survey (1,396 respondents); 48 percent of Koreans and 27 percent of Taiwanese responded that they were independents. Alternatively, Korea’s average party membership out of the total population for the past ten years is 9.7 percent (Korea National Election Commission, 2007 Report on Political Parties’ Activities and Finance, 2008). 5. Party organization: The degree of routinization of intra-party procedures regarding decision making, party leadership selection, candidate nomination, committee organizations, party finance management, and so on (Mainwaring 1999, 27). This indicator is based on information from various empirical studies that describe party politics in Korea and Taiwan (Park 2006; Fell 2005).

The cause of party instability observed in Korea is linked to authoritarian legacies of party marginalization and the institutional incentives associated with presidentialism. South Korea’s military dictators saw the danger of deposed civilian politicians and kept political parties and electoral politics at the peripheries of policy processes (Lim 1985, 74 –77). The creation or dissolution of political parties was largely in the hands of authoritarian regimes before 1987. Thus, the formation of political parties in Korea was never from the bottom up to reflect social divisions or preferences, but rather from the top down to meet the political objectives of authoritarian governments. Although opposition parties were periodically allowed to form in pre-­ democratic Korea, these parties functioned more like transient groupings for individual leaders vying for presidential office. Geddes and Frantz (2007) have observed similar problems of party instability in Latin American democracies where authoritarian interludes severely interrupted the development of political parties. They argue that parties created by the needs of authoritarian regimes attract political opportunists (while losing committed politicians) and that these opportunistic politicians are more likely to split into different flocks whenever and wherever their ambitions are best served. The centrality of the presidential election in Korean politics is also accountable for continued and frequent party changes. The winner-take-all

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nature of presidential races tends to undermine party institutionalization by increasing possibilities for presidential hopefuls to create their own political parties. Indeed, the creation of new parties or party splits have occurred before presidential elections, a choice made by individual politicians running in those elections (see Figure 4.1). These processes have placed Korean parties in a vicious cycle of organizational instability. Organizationally inchoate parties are easy to split or dissolve, and the newly created parties are hesitant to invest in building party bases owing to anticipated party reshuffling. Trapped in this cycle, Korean parties continued to be formed in a top-down manner while party politics continued to be dominated by a small number of political leaders. From labor unions’ point of view, organizationally feeble parties with no interest in labor representation were neither attractive political agents to build partisan affiliation nor reliable programmatic representatives to work toward pro-labor policy outcomes. Therefore, national unions continued investing their resources in union organizing and mobilizing union members instead of building relationships with established political parties. They used their organizational capacities to directly confront the central government, where labor policies were enacted and executed. These experiences reinforced the distance and distrust between union actors and existing political parties and set high reputational costs for the former to seek or revert to partisan support under democratic governments. Union leaders and rank-and-file members considered the seeking of a partisan ally to be the equivalent of betraying the genuine cause of the labor movement because their past interactions with political parties had borne no fruit. For instance, even the moderate unionists complained that building relations with established parties was regarded as “selling out” and detrimental to the unions because it would harm their reputation for independent unionism. In the words of a union leader who considers himself a moderate activist (Interview KW32-1), It is not that we don’t want to talk to politicians. We do. We submit petitions, and we lobby them to support a pro-labor bill. But they gave us nothing. This is why rank-and-file workers want us to struggle and struggle [tujaeng tujaeng in Korean].

The interactions between unions and political parties in democratic Korea clearly show the sustained norm of union independence. The conservative FKTU maintained a tenuous relationship with the incumbent government (the president), but the more vocal democratic KCTU built no linkages with established political parties. Instead of seeking partisan relations with existing parties that had been unstable and unrepresentative regarding labor issues, democratic unionists chose to organize their own political party. This was

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finally achieved through the establishment of the DLP in 2000 and its modest electoral success in the 2004 legislative election. Since the resumption of electoral contestation in 1987, there have been several aborted attempts at creating pro-labor, progressive parties. During the first national legislative election, in 1988, two parties, the Hankyoreh Party and the People’s Party (Minjung-dang), were organized to represent the interests of working people and to raise distributional issues in the electoral arena (see Figure  4.1). Yet their electoral performance was disappointing because they failed to produce an elected seat. These electoral failures were attributable to various factors, such as the high entry barriers for new parties, the parties’ internal ideological divides, and the lack of grassroots organizing. The existing electoral system based on the simple plurality rule in single-member districts (SMDs) and the national list system favored large parties over new electoral entrants.10 Politicians and activists in the progressive camp learned from their failures in earlier elections that their electoral performance would not change unless the rules of the game (the electoral system) were altered. Labor and civic groups submitted an appeal to the Constitutional Court in 2000 requesting an examination of the unconstitutionality contained in the existing election laws (Lee and Lim 2006).11 The Court issued a decision requesting that the National Assembly revise the existing electoral system. As a result of this action, a mixed-member majoritarian system (or two-vote mixed system) was introduced. Under this new electoral rule, voters cast one vote for a candidate in the given district (for 242 out of 299 National Assembly seats) and a second vote for a party (for the remaining 57 seats). The new system first went into effect in the 2002 local elections (for 682 local councilors) and the 2004 national legislative elections. Although the electoral performance of the DLP was gradually improving in both national and local races before 2002, the change in the electoral system in large part explains the party’s success in post-2002 elections. In the legislative election of 2004, the DLP finally earned two seats from SMDs and eight seats from the proportional representation list by gaining 13.1 percent of nationwide support (data from the Korea National Election Commission, accessed on February 1, 2008). However, the party suffered from internal strife and was divided in two in 2008: the DLP and the Progressive New Party. This party split dampened the DLP’s electoral performance in the 2008 legislative race. The party earned only five seats, two from SMDs and three from the proportional representation list. The votes for the party declined to 5.2 percent (ibid.). The introduction of a proportional representation component

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ta b l e 4 . 4

Korean parties’ membership size and dues-paying members in 2007 (percentages in parentheses) Grand National Party United Democratic Party Democratic Labor Party

Party Members

Dues-Paying Members

1,650,011 1,218,297 82,262

200,583 (12.2%) 86,032 (7.1%) 51,655 (62.8%)

Korea National Election Commission, 2007 Report on Political Parties’ Activity and Finance (2008). The total number of party membership accounts for 7.6 percent of the total population and 10 percent of the total electorate (persons twenty years old and over). s o u rc e : note:

in the electoral system contributed to improving the DLP’s performance in the legislative elections, but the simple majoritarian nature of the presidential race made the party’s presidential bids far from successful. The most successful attempt for Kwon Young-kil, who ran in the presidential race three times (1997, 2002, and 2007), was 3.8 percent of the popular vote in 2002 (ibid.). The DLP is distinctive from other parties in Korea in terms of the party’s interconnectedness with sectoral organizations. Most notably, the KCTU, along with other sectoral and civic organizations, provides a firm basis for this labor party.12 The KCTU provides about 40 percent of the DLP membership in addition to a substantial proportion of the party leadership.13 Since its formation in 2000, party membership grew from 13,000 to over 100,000 as of 2007. This rapid rise in party membership is phenomenal compared to the organizational shallowness of other established parties in Korea. According to the 2007 Report on Political Parties’ Activity and Finance, the DLP has the highest percentage of dues-paying members, at 62.8 percent, compared to the Grand National Party’s 12.2 percent and the United Democratic Party’s 7.1 percent (National Election Commission 2008). Table 4.4 shows the size of party membership and the percentage of dues-paying members of the major political parties in Korea. Although the DLP was organized in a bottom-up manner based on labor unions, it is not a labor party in the strict sense. The party is more an amalgamation of democratic unions and progressive social groups, particularly former college student activists and critical intellectuals, who had been the backbone of Korea’s pro-democracy movements. According to a party membership report, about three-quarters of the members are in their thirties or forties and identify themselves as working in various white-collar or professional positions (DLP Annual Report 2006). A survey of DLP supporters regarding their socioeconomic status and political views also confirms the diversity of the party base. As summarized in Table 4.5, this survey shows that

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ta b l e 4 . 5

Supporters of the DLP Category

Percentage

gender

Category

Percentage

age

Male Female

45.8 54.2

residence Seoul Incheon/Gyeongki Busan/Ulsan/Gyeongnam Daegu/Gyeongbuk Jeolla Chungcheong Gangwon Jeju

17.6 36.5 31.2 14.6

occupation 20.6 24.9 20.6 11.0 10.6 8.3 3.3 0.7

education Less than middle school High school graduate Technical college graduate University degree and over

19 –29 30 –39 40 – 49 50 and over Agriculture/forestry Self-employed Blue collar White collar Housewife Student Unemployed/other

1.3 17.1 18.1 27.8 23.4 7.4 5.0

monthly household income 8.7 30.0 11.3 50.0

Less than USD 2,000 2,001–2,999 3,000 –3,999 4,000 – 4,999 5,000 and over

9.8 30.5 26.6 14.1 19.1

Progressive Policy Institute, 2006 Survey of DLP Supporters (2006). The survey addressed 511 respondents who identified themselves as supportive of the DLP.

s o u rc e : note:

citizens who support the labor party are primarily in their thirties, reside in metropolitan and industrial areas, have university or higher degrees, work in white-collar jobs, and make an average household income in the range of US $2,000 –$4,000 per month.14 This means that the individuals who had been at the core of the pro-democracy coalition in the 1980s form the majority of DLP participants as well as its supporters. How has the relationship between democratic unions and a labor party affected the modes of union mobilization? Little change has been observable because the DLP is still a minority party with a short history in the national legislature and has not been able to exert significant influence on the legislative process and to provide meaningful rewards to its labor constituency. With fewer than 10 lawmakers in the 299-seat National Assembly (2004 –2008), the DLP lawmakers were unsuccessful in making an impact on the legislative process. The legislative procedures of the National Assembly, particularly the rule of the floor negotiation body (won-ne gyoseop danche), block small parties from fully participating in legislative activities. This rule allows only parties with more than 20 legislators to partake in negotiations over the legislative itinerary and the allocation of legislative committee seats

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and chairpersons (Park 2006). Minority parties with fewer than 20 lawmakers are excluded from these negotiations, and their input for agenda setting and lawmaking in the National Assembly is severely undermined. It may be too early to gauge the impact of the DLP’s entrance into the institutionalized political process on the patterns of union mobilization in Korea. Unions restrain militancy when their partisan ally is able to provide rewards in the form of labor policy or other material benefits. The DLP is still too minor to be representative of labor interests in the Korean legislature. However, one thing is evident here: The change in the electoral system that improved proportionality enhanced the electoral fortunes of a labor party. This constitutes an important change in the configurations of institutional openness to new parties such as the DLP. Yet its impact on changing organized labor’s political perspectives and modes of mobilization strategies will depend on the party’s improved electoral and legislative performance.

Political Parties and Unions in Taiwan Greatly differing from the Korean experience, partisan linkages between political parties and labor unions became a political norm in democratized Taiwan. The conservative CFL has been tied to the KMT, and the democratic TCTU has been associated with the DPP. Taiwanese unionists considered their partisan ties as major channels of interest articulation in the democratizing political context, where the KMT and the DPP dominated electoral competition. Such close cooperation between parties and unions was possible because these political parties were organizationally stable, representing each side of the predominant political division of ethnic identity. The TCTU workers who identified their grievances as ethnic injustices saw their interests as being especially represented by the opposition DPP. Once this pattern of grievance solving through political channels was established, unionists had few incentives to invest in union organizations and to shift gears toward militant activism. The CFL continued to take full advantage of its connection with the KMT until the party lost its ruling position with its defeat in the 2000 presidential election. The KMT’s electoral loss in the presidential bid against Chen Shuibian ushered in the CFL’s internal divisions over the efficacy of its partisan affiliation. The CFL was particularly in a dire situation because the KMT, now as an opposition party, was constrained in providing certain privileges, especially financial support, to its affiliated organizations. Being traditionally dependent on party organization but lacking the organizational basis to act

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otherwise, the CFL finally chose to ally with the People First Party (PFP, a splinter of the KMT).15 However, with the KMT’s return to power in the subsequent elections, the CFL also resumed its partisan ties with the KMT. For the CFL, whose organizational existence had been tied to the KMT for the past four decades, if not longer, it was impossible for the union leaders to seek alternative paths of union activism. Therefore, the long-held tradition of the CFL–KMT nexus survived the democratic transition period. In a similar fashion, newly formed labor activism outside of CFL dominance was also aided by political party aspirants. The democratic unions of the TCTU were developed under the support of the dangwai, the prototype of the DPP, from their incipient stage. As discussed in Chapter 3, the New Tide faction within the dangwai movement was particularly more concerned about social issues such as labor, women’s rights, and the environment. In 1984 the New Tide faction organized the Taiwan Labor Front (TLF), the oldest and the most well-known Taiwanese labor-movement group (besides unions) to assist workers in need of legal consultation, education for union organizing, and union networking to foster the development of labor movements.16 The new activism promoted by the dangwai and the TLF was called an independent labor movement (zizhu gonghui yundong) to signify its genesis outside of KMT control and eventually formed the organizational basis of the TCTU. Later, in 1989, a more radical faction within the DPP split and formed the Workers’ Party. Although this labor party has so far failed to produce an elected seat in the Legislative Yuan, it is also directly involved in union movements. The party organized the Labor Rights Association (LRA) to coordinate activities between the party and labor unions. Figure 4.2 illustrates the patterned relationships among political parties, labor-movement organizations, and unions in Taiwan. In each of these cases, union activism was nurtured and developed with the support of political parties. Such a direct involvement of political parties in union organizing is obviously different from the experiences of Korean unions. The close relationship that developed between the TCTU and the DPP is particularly noteworthy because it illustrates the process through which the militant potential of democratic unions was absorbed into formal politics. On one side, there was an opposition party that was in need of building a social base and attracting votes in gradually expanding electoral spaces. Competing against the KMT, which incorporated the CFL as part of its vote-­ mobilizing strategy, the DPP particularly recognized the advantage of supporting an alternative union independent of the CFL. Allying with such an

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90

Parties

KMT 1949–present

Labor movement groups

Unions

figure

CFL

DPP 1986–present

WP 1989–present

TLF

LRA

TCTU

WLAC

Independent unions

4.2  Political parties, labor-movement groups, and unions in Taiwan

notes:

KMT  Kuomintang Party; DPP  Democratic Progressive Party; WP  Workers’ Party; TLF  Taiwan Labor Front; LRA  Labor Rights Association; CFL  Chinese Federation of Labor; TCTU  Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions.

alternative labor federation would weaken the KMT’s capacity to mobilize workers/­voters (Ho 2006; Yang 2007). On the other side, the fledgling democratic unions found the DPP’s increasing electoral success in local and national elections to be important political opportunities. The TCTU unions began to be formed and gained recognition from localities where the DPP was in control of local administration. (This process will be fully discussed in Chapter 5.) Most of the first generation of union activists who had been critical of CFL and KMT control in their workplaces said they were first politically conscious of ethnic injustices and then became aware of class issues (Fan 2000).17 Such close relations between democratic unionists and the opposition party are well illustrated in the following statement by a lifelong union activist in Taiwan (Interview TW06-1): Workers joined political activism first, even outside of their unions. Because opposition candidates ran in local elections, we worked and grew with the DPP activists with high hopes that once elected they would do something for workers [author’s emphasis].

This statement suggests that the norm of partisan strategy in solving labor issues has been deeply ingrained among TCTU unionists. The DPP was

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d­ irectly involved in supporting the organization of the TCTU and had politicians to represent labor interests, particularly in local governments. Unionists reciprocated by working for the election of DPP candidates in various levels of elections. As compared in Table 4.1, 3.7 percent of all legislators elected in the past six Legislative Yuan had a career background in labor. This proportion is obviously higher than Korea’s figure of under 2 percent. Additionally, the representation of politicians from the business sector was low, at 5.5 percent of all elected lawmakers. Conservative parties such as the KMT and the PFP produced more labor legislators (29 in total) than did the DPP or independents (10 in total). These numbers show that the extent of labor representation in the national legislative process was more significant in Taiwan than in Korea. The close relationship between parties and unions is also illustrated in workers’ voting patterns. Postelection surveys, as summarized in Table 4.6, show more systematic voting patterns of Taiwanese workers compared to their counterparts in Korea. First, workers responded that they cast more votes for the DPP in general except in the 1995 and 1998 surveys. However, if we compare voters who identify themselves as workers and Taiwanese and those who see themselves as workers and mainlanders, their votes clearly diverge between the KMT and the DPP. In all six elections, Taiwanese workers supported the DPP more than any other party, and mainlander workers did the same for the KMT. Another factor to be weighed in analyzing these survey data is the high percentage of respondents who declined to answer or just checked “I don’t know.” According to Yang (2007), who has studied the voting behavior of the Taiwanese electorate, the survey respondents in the earlier period of democratization, especially those who identified themselves as “Taiwanese,” were often hesitant to provide their political opinion openly, and this tendency increased the proportion of answers in the residual categories. This aspect may have dampened a clearer contrast between these two voting groups. If regionalism has been the most salient feature of Korea’s post-transition elections, ethnic identity has served as the primary dividing line in Taiwan’s electoral competition. The salience of ethnic identity has been evident both in citizens’ vote choices and political parties’ issue positioning. Table 4.7 pre­ sents the ethnic background of party supporters for the KMT, the DPP, and the NP in the period 1995 –2004. The NP is most dependent on mainlander supporters, followed by the KMT, whereas the DPP is predominantly reliant on Taiwanese voters. This summary clearly shows that the three parties rely on distinct groups of people.

ta b l e 4 . 6

Workers’ voting in Taiwan: 1992 –2004 (percentage) 1992 LY (991)

KMT

DPP

General Taiwanese Both Chinese Worker Worker Taiwanese Both Chinese

10.7 8.3 16.7 22 11.7 8.3 58.3 33.3

4.1 9.4 3.4 4.8 17.1 28.6 42.9 28.6

1995 LY (1,521)

KMT

DPP

General Taiwanese Both Chinese Worker Worker Taiwanese Both Chinese

25.0 23.8 57.7 16.9 22.9 23.3 66.7 10.0

8.6 44.4 33.3 11.1 20.5 55.6 22.2 0

1998 LY (1,207)

KMT

DPP

General Taiwanese Both Chinese Worker Worker Taiwanese Both Chinese

9.9 36.1 43.7 14.3 22.7 39.3 39.3 3.6

4.0 68.1 31.9 0 14.9 42.9 57.1 0

2001 LY (2,022)

KMT

DPP

General Taiwanese Both Chinese Worker Worker Taiwanese Both Chinese

18.6 24.2 56.4 16.8 11.7 10.0 30.0 15.0

23.2 53.8 41.1 2.6 17.0 22.2 27.8 0

Refuse to Answer/ Don’t Know 30.8 (+ 45.6 undecided)

27.8 (+ 12.4 undecided)

Refuse to Answer/ Don’t Know 19.9

40.6

Refuse to Answer/ Don’t Know 71.2

44.5

Refuse to Answer/ Don’t Know 5.8

15.3

Labor Unions and Political Parties

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ta b l e 4 . 6 (continued) 2004 LY (1,258)

KMT

DPP

General Taiwanese Both Chinese Worker Worker Taiwanese Both Chinese

20.4 20.6 70.4 7.4 12.8 17.1 73.9 7.1

27.8 71.1 25.1 2.9 15.4 71.5 24.9 2.9

Refuse to Answer/ Don’t Know 8.1

32.7

s o u rc e :

Taiwan Election and Democratization Study Surveys (TEDS), various years. LY  Legislative Yuan elections, and the number in parentheses is the total number of survey respondents. (The analysis of this survey data was assisted by Pi-Han Tsai, graduate student in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California–San Diego, in June 2009.) notes:

What were the conditions that brought unionists and parties to cooperate in democratized Taiwan? The political division around “ethnic justice” and well-institutionalized political parties served as channels of meaningful political representation for Taiwanese workers. As discussed in Chapter  3, the political division of authoritarianism versus democratization in Taiwan overlapped with and reinforced the identity divisions between mainlanders and Taiwanese. Democratization meant the ending of the KMT regime, supported by mainlanders, and the restoration of ethnic justice for the Taiwanese people.18 Democracy and ethnic justice were inseparable issues for the political opposition in Taiwan. In the words of Shelley Rigger, who has closely observed Taiwan politics (2001, 310), For many ROC citizens, loosening the ruling party’s political control meant selfdetermination for the majority ethnic group; “democratization” was defined as a Taiwan governed by and for the Taiwanese majority. In short, ethnic justice and political reform were inextricably connected, and together they formed the opposition party’s ideological foundation.

This political division has been the dominant one in Taiwan’s post-transition electoral contestations. An elite survey of Taiwanese politicians also confirms that the national identity has been the most salient issue in ­characterizing post-transition party competition. When they were asked “What have been the most salient issues in Taiwan’s elections over the last decade [1991–2001]?” they all equivocally responded with “national identity,” regardless of their partisan affiliation (Fell 2005, 27).19 Taiwan’s political parties have competed on clear and stable positions and contributed to higher levels of party identification among their voters.

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ta b l e 4 . 7

Ethnic background of party supporters in Taiwan (by percentage) dpp

kmt

np

Year

Taiwanese

Mainlander

Taiwanese

Mainlander

Taiwanese

Mainlander

1995 1998 2001 2004

96.7 95.7 98.1 97.1

3.3 4.3 1.9 2.9

83.3 81.1 77.4 78.4

16.7 18.9 22.6 21.6

52.8 58.5 71.4 66.7

47.2 41.5 28.6 33.3

s o u rc e :

Taiwan Election and Democratization Study Surveys (TEDS), various years.

This ethnic-identity division included the issue of tong-tu—unification with or independence from mainland China. Voters of mainland Chinese origin are more likely to be pro-unification (or more of a tone-downed status quo) and pro–Pan Blue Camp, whereas voters of Taiwanese origin are more likely to be pro-independence (or more practical de facto instead of de jure independence) and thus pro–Pan Green Camp. The KMT leads the Pan Blue Camp, with its splinter parties, such as the New Party and the People First Party, which all stand for pro-unification. The DPP is aligned with other pro-independence parties such as the Taiwan Independence Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union to form the Pan Green Camp. The colors blue and green refer to the background of the KMT and DPP party flags, respectively. Workers and unionists also perceived the subjugation they ­experienced in and out of their workplaces primarily as ethnic injustice (Ho 2006; Yang 2007). As such, workers who experienced unfair practices by mainlander owners or supervisors saw the DPP as a political agent to represent and resolve their grievances. For Taiwanese working people, ethnic identity was in itself a class issue as they were the ones most deeply attached to a nativist Taiwanese identity (Yang 2007, 507). Taiwan’s political parties did not only represent the political division that overlapped with workers’ interests, but also maintained a high level of organizational stability and institutionalization. In contrast to the weak and fluid party organizations in Korea, Taiwan’s political parties have evolved into strong and coherent organizations forming a relatively stable two-party (or camp) system centered around the KMT and the DPP (Rigger 2001; Cheng 2003; Fell 2005). Since the expansion of electoral contestation in the early 1990s, there have been several new parties that have splintered off from the two major parties. This has increased the number of electorally relevant parties to five, but these parties are still grouped into two stable blocks, the Pan

Labor Unions and Political Parties Democratic Progressive Party (1986)

Kuomintang (1894)

LY 1992

95 Labor Party (1987)

Workers’ Party (1989)

New Party (1993)

LY 1995 Taiwan Independence Party (1996)

PR 1996 LY 1998 People First Party (2000)

PR 2000

Taiwan Solidarity Union (2001)

LY 2001 PR/LY 2004 NP

figure

PFP

KMT

DPP

TSU

TIP

NPSU (2004)

WP

4.3  Political parties in democratic Taiwan

notes:

PR  presidential elections; LY  Legislative Yuan elections. The year of party establishment is in parentheses. The NPSU (Non-Partisan Solidarity Union)  a network of independent politicians. A solid line ( __ )  party continuation. An arrow (→)  party merger or split. An asterisk (*)  party dissolution.

Blue Camp and the Pan Green Camp. Figure 4.3 illustrates the evolution of political parties in democratic Taiwan. As shown in Table 4.3, which compares the level of party institutionalization in Korea and Taiwan, only five electorally significant parties appeared in the last six legislative elections in Taiwan (compared to nineteen different parties in Korea). These parties show an average longevity of 32.2 years or a median longevity of 14 years (compared to 4.4 years in Korea). There is also a high density of networks between parties and organized sectors of the society and a high degree of partisan allegiance (Y. Chu 2001, 95). The Central Standing Committee of each party exercises full authority over all candidate nominations in addition to other important decision making (ibid.). This high level of party institutionalization can be explained by the nature of the KMT government itself. The KMT had been the governing party in Taiwan for almost four decades. The old KMT was viewed as a quasiLeninist party in which the party and the state formed a symbiotic relationship in organizing and penetrating society (Cheng 1989; Y. Chu 2001). In

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Labor Unions and Political Parties

Korea ­political parties before and after democratization were perceived and functioned as political vehicles of individual dictators or presidential contenders. But Taiwan’s KMT had been the country’s governing party and a well-­established party organization. The KMT had effectively adapted to the changing political conditions and survived the democratization process until it lost power to the DPP in the 2000 presidential election and the subsequent legislative election in 2001. The party came back to power in 2008 by winning both the presidential and legislative elections. The longevity and adaptability of the KMT are associated with the party’s need to survive as an émigré regime on the island of Taiwan. On the one hand, the party executed internal reforms to get rid of corruption, which had been considered a primary reason for its defeat in mainland China. On the other hand, it allowed local elections through which the party could build connections with the Taiwanese and incorporate local elites and factions. The KMT’s decision to open local-level electoral competitions contributed to its organizational institutionalization as well. Because elections in numerous localities required a high level of coordination with the party, the KMT developed specific internal rules about candidate selection, professionally staffed policy research apparatuses, and mechanisms to organize a large number of card-carrying members (Y. Chu 2001; Cheng 2003).20 The SNTV rule that was used in these elections tends to be conducive to better-organized parties because it creates two coordination problems for political organizations (Carey and Shugart 1995; Cox 1997; Lin 1998). First, because multimember seats are at stake, parties must accurately estimate the number of votes they can expect to receive in each district in order to nominate an optimal number of candidates. Second, because votes are not transferable from one candidate to another, parties have to make sure that votes are evenly distributed among the party’s nominees in order to prevent the loss of votes that might occur. For the KMT, it was the Department of Organization Affairs that calculated the likely number of votes each candidate would receive in each district and determined the optimal number for candidate nominations (Wu 1995). The need for coordination was the same for the DPP, which maintained a group leadership, instead of a single leader, to make decisions for candidate selections and campaign programs (Rigger 1996). Thus, political parties developing from local elections decided under the SNTV system were faced with a strong need to build effective coordinating mechanisms, which contributed to the organizational institutionalization of the parties. The opening sequence of electoral space from local to national levels has significantly affected the development of political opposition. Electoral op-

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portunities tend to enable moderate political opposition to emerge as viable alternatives (Pei 1998). The opportunities offered at Taiwan’s local elections had the effect of moderating political opposition and emboldening the role of political parties as primary vehicles of political opposition. The opposition movement, first clustered around the dangwai and later the DPP, perceived a party organization as the most effective force of political opposition to challenge KMT rule. The DPP was initially divided into two major factions that espoused different political strategies. The more ideologically oriented New Tide faction promoted the use of extra-parliamentary methods and called for declaring the independence of Taiwan, whereas the Formosa faction supported reform within the system and maintained the position of Taiwanese selfdetermination (Fell 2005). With continued participation in electoral competitions, however, the DPP activists learned to moderate their demands and take full advantage of this given political space.21 The opposition party was able to eventually expand its support base by emphasizing ideas of democratization, ethnic justice, and self-determination and by allying with other movement actors such as labor, women, and environmentalists. Additionally, the late introduction of presidential elections saved Taiwan’s political parties from falling into individualized political machines for presidential hopefuls. Learning to participate and compete at the local levels, intra-party coordination and cooperation became much more important than internal maneuvering for the presidential candidacy in terms of the viability and success of political parties. Table 4.8 summarizes the electoral performance of political parties in six legislative elections and four presidential races in democratized Taiwan. These results attest to the stability in Taiwan’s party competition, where the major parties remain the same with little volatility in their vote shares. The most notable exception is the 2000 presidential election, when James Soong split from the KMT to run as a presidential candidate by forming the PFP. Therefore, Taiwan’s post-transition politics, compared to the Korean experience, is dominated by party politics where political parties operate as the primary agents of interest aggregation and representation. Taiwan’s institutionalized parties, with stable policy positions and organizational networks with social groups, have been able to pull unions into the institutional realm of formal politics. The conservative CFL maintained its traditional ties with the KMT and pursued its interests through this partisan channel. Also, for the new democratic unions of the TCTU a partisan ally such as the DPP, which developed into a powerful opposition party, was a critical political resource. The TCTU not only developed under the support of the DPP but also ­relied

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ta b l e 4 . 8

Vote shares of political parties in democratic Taiwan national legislative

presidential

Camp

Party

1992

1995

1998

2001

2004

2008

1996 2000* 2004

2008

Pan Blue

KMT NP PFP Total DPP TIP TSU Total

52.5 — — 52.5 30.8 — — 30.8

46.1 12.9 — 59.0 33.2 — — 33.2

46.4 7.1 — 53.5 29.5 1.5 — 31.0

28.6 2.6 18.6 49.8 33.4 0 7.8 41.2

34.9 0.1 13.9 48.9 37.9 0 7.8 45.7

53.5 — 0.3 53.8 38.7 — — 38.7

54.0 14.9 — 68.9 21.13 — — 21.13

58.5 — — 58.5 41.6 — — 41.6

Pan Green

23.1 0.13 39.30 62.44 39.3 — — 39.3

49.9 — — 49.4 50.1 — — 50.1

s o u rc e :

Data from the Taiwan Central Election Commission, accessed on February 15, 2009. A dash (—) indicates either that the party was not yet established or that it did not run candidates. *The presidency went to the opposition candidate, Chen Shui-bian, for the first time in the 2000 presidential election. James Soong’s split from the KMT and running as an independent candidate contributed to Chen’s ­election. notes:

on its partisan relations to pursue labor interests. Because of the KMT’s legacy of using union organizations as mechanisms for vote mobilization, the DPP also recognized the importance of developing linkages with labor unions in its competition against the KMT. An example of how unionists used their partisan linkages to achieve their goals is evident in the testimony of Chien Hsi-chien, who served two terms (1996 –2001) in the Legislative Yuan as a DPP legislator.22 He describes how the interaction between unionists and legislators worked in the process of labor-law reforms (Interview TP(A)16-1): Few politicians are genuinely pro-labor, but all politicians do care about votes from workers because electoral competition is very stiff and unions can make politicians look ugly. So whenever I was involved with labor-law writing or the revision of existing legislation and received little support from other legislators within and without the DPP, I contacted labor unions of the district from which a specific legislator was elected. I asked unionists to put pressure on the legislator to support the labor bill on the agenda. Union leaders would pressure the legislator by threatening that they would switch their electoral support to another politician. Most times this worked very well.

For the newly developing labor unions of the TCTU, the partisan linkage with the DPP has obviously offered an important channel in pursuing their interests. This was more evident when unions were able to take advantage of the chasm between the central government under the KMT and local governments under the DPP (detailed discussion to follow in Chapter 5). TCTU unionists were also active in the election campaign of Chen Shui-bian for his presidential bid in 2000. As Chen won the race by campaigning on a platform of democratic reform, including pro-labor policies, many unionists and

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workers held high hopes for the Chen government. During the DPP government, the TCTU actively participated in various channels to influence labor policy making. However, even when the Chen government was not able to deliver all of its pro-labor promises because of internal and external pressures for neoliberal economic restructuring, it was not easy for the TCTU to shift to other methods of mobilization. According to a labor activist of the TLF, a liaison group between the DPP and the TCTU (Interview TA01-2), The TLF and the TCTU have the DPP complex. Labor movements followed the DPP and chose to cooperate with it in most cases. But when the DPP politicians failed to deliver what they promised, unions had no mobilizing strength to enforce the promises on the DPP [author’s emphasis].

This was because Taiwanese unions had “shifted resources and energies from workplace organization to parliament, elections, and local governments” since the early years of democratization (Ho 2006, 125). Both the CFL and the TCTU concentrated their resources on using partisan linkages instead of organizing workplace activism. Under these conditions, it is unclear to what extent they would be able to shift gears from the long-held practice of partisan cooperation to confrontational actions that would resist the increasing pace of labor-market restructuring, including the privatization of SOEs, which directly targeted their member unions and consequently undermined their organizational basis. Another factor that can affect the partisan relations between political parties and unions is the electoral law reform of 2004. Taiwan’s SNTV system had been criticized for being the cause of rampant factional mobilizations.23 In 2004 the members of the Legislative Yuan grudgingly agreed to change the electoral rules and put the new rules into effect in the 2008 legislative elections. The new system extends the lawmakers’ terms from three to four years while reducing the number of seats from 225 (168 multimember districts, 41 proportional representation, and 8 assigned seats) to 113 (73 single-member districts, 34 proportional representation, and 6 assigned seats).24 As in Korea’s new electoral system, it is a mixed-member majoritarian system where voters cast two votes, one for a SMD candidate and another for a party. The then-current multimember districts, which elected an average of 5 legislators (ranging from 1 to 10), were redistricted into 73 constituencies to elect 1 legislator from each. Parties earning more than 5 percent of the nationwide votes are eligible for the allocation of proportional representation seats. The new rules went into effect in the 2008 legislative elections, where the DPP suffered the most. Although the DPP had performed well in the multimember districts under the previous SNTV system through effective

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and careful coordination, the newly introduced SMDs hampered the proportional translation of votes into elected seats. The DPP gained 38.7 percent of votes but only 27 seats (23.9 percent), whereas 53.5 percent of votes for the KMT delivered 81 seats (71.7 percent) (data from the Taiwan Central Election Commission, accessed May 3, 2009). Moreover, under the new majoritarian system, the votes that can be mobilized by unions have less impact on election outcomes than under the previous SNTV system. These changes may affect the existing partisan relations between the DPP and the TCTU as well as between the KMT and the CFL. Under these changing political and economic conditions, labor unions in Taiwan may have to search for alternative methods to be able to remain a meaningful sectoral force. This chapter discusses the importance of partisan allies in harnessing union militancy. Democratic politics purports to resolve various social conflicts through institutionalized processes, and political parties connect these social interests into policy outcomes. Labor politics also depends on whether organized labor can find an agent to represent its interests in the formal political process. When labor unions engage in continued militancy, the cause may lie beyond the realm of unions themselves and more within the political representation system. When Korea democratized in the late 1980s, new democratic unions formed the KCTU and were engaged in militant mobilization strategies. A close examination of the relations between political parties and labor unions suggests that the militant labor movement in Korea was a result of party failures. There was no political party that represented labor until the KCTU formed its own party, the DLP, in 2000. Before the DLP, there was no political party that represented distributional issues in a programmatic manner. Existing parties have been unstable and under-institutionalized, so they cannot be considered as a political vehicle to represent labor. Moreover, the dominant political division in post-transition elections was regionalism, which ­further divided workers’ votes along native ties. Having no access to formal politics, unions were driven out of the conventional political arenas and forced to resort to protest activities. In contrast, new unions in democratized Taiwan not only developed under the support of the opposition party, the DPP, but they also took advantage of this partisan alliance to enhance labor interests. The conservative CFL remained tied to the KMT, and the newly organized TCTU allied with the DPP. Party competition in democratized Taiwan revolved around the ethnic identity issue, which further attracted workers into party politics. Taiwanese

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workers saw their grievances of ethnic injustice as being represented by the DPP. Although this was not a typical alliance between labor and a left-leaning party, it was generated by the specific political conditions under which the Taiwanese workers were situated. The two-party competition between the KMT and the DPP at various levels of elections provided opportunities and leverage to Taiwanese unions to articulate labor issues. Therefore, the TCTU’s moderation and restraint cannot be understood without its linkage with the DPP, which captured the offices of various local governments first and finally the presidency in 2000.

5

Labor-Reform Politics in Democratized Korea and Taiwan

The Korean labor movement on television news looks very strong and [more] militant than the Taiwanese unions. But why is the situation of Korean workers not better than that of Taiwanese workers? Ho Yeng-tang, labor activist in Taiwan

This chapter presents a comparative case study of four labor-reform episodes (recognition of union rights, wage increases, workweek reductions, and job protection/anti-privatization) in democratized Korea and Taiwan.1 These labor-reform subjects constituted the most important and contested labor issues in the post-transition decades, preoccupying the collective mobilization of labor unions. Through the examination of these cases, this chapter analyzes labor unions’ strategies to achieve their goals, the negotiation process with other collective actors (the government, political parties, and employers), and the actual outcomes for labor over the last two decades. Although the labor reforms converged around these four issues, each episode entailed divergent processes, interactions, and outcomes. By closely examining the unfolding of labor-reform politics, this study highlights how historical legacies created different starting points for labor unions and how labor-reform episodes built on one another to reinforce the diverging paths of labor politics in Korea and Taiwan, respectively. Korean unions that resorted to militant mobilization were engaged in a prolonged and contentious process that brought about more gains in ­company-level wages but less achievement in national policy reforms. On the contrary, for Taiwanese unions that relied on political lobbying and pressuring, the negotiation process was swift and accommodating. As such, their activism was more effective in securing labor-policy concessions, while ­obtaining less-drastic changes at the company level. An outcome of these contrasting labor-reform processes in the last twenty years was different

Labor-Reform Politics

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d­ egrees of flexibility observed in the labor market. Comparative indicators of labor-market flexibility reveal that the Korean labor market is more flexible than the Taiwanese, meaning that Korean workers are less protected by institutional measures than are their counterparts in Taiwan. This chapter reconfirms the argument offered throughout this study that these divergent outcomes resulted from differences in partisan linkages that were formed in the incipient period of democratic transition. When unions were aided by their partisan allies, they moderated their actions and were able to have a meaningful influence on policy outcomes. Union actors that lacked such an institutional mediator resorted to militant mobilization and consequently failed in inducing pro-labor policy concessions. Once these divergent modes of mobilization become the established norm of the nation’s labor movement, unions’ closeness to or distance from formal politics turns into a self-reinforcing practice and makes a change of course highly costly.

Four Labor-Reform Episodes and Union Gains When democratic transitions occurred, labor reform emerged as an important part of the democratic reform package. This was more pronounced in Korea and Taiwan, where previous authoritarian regimes relied on labor suppression in the process of promoting export-oriented development strategies (Deyo 1989; Ogle 1990; Chu 1996; Koo 2001).2 With democratization, beginning in 1987, workers in Korea and Taiwan formed new unions and participated in collective actions to address grievances that had accumulated under authoritarian rule. Workers’ protests in the two decades after the democratic transition revolved around labor issues: recognition of union rights, wage increases, workweek reductions, and job security/anti-privatization. I term these four areas of labor contestation labor-reform episodes and trace the ensuing changes from each episode to examine labor’s gains under democratic government. For the outcomes of each reform episode, I identify and discuss the labor issue under contention, major actors involved in the contention, the nature of processes and interactions, the duration of each episode, and policy changes. As Table 5.1 shows, Korean unions under democratic government gained union pluralism, significant wage increases, and reduced workweeks but became more vulnerable to layoffs. Labor unions and the central government were often the major actors in these labor reforms (except for wage negotiations) without any meaningful intermediation by political parties or elected politicians. Labor unions participated in negotiations, but the prevalence of government’s unilateralism pushed them to militant mobilization. All these labor-reform episodes involved protracted negotiations and aborted ­agreements

ta b l e 5 . 1

Labor-reform politics in Korea and Taiwan: 1987–2007 Labor Reform

Korea

Taiwan

union rights Actors Process Duration Outcome

KCTU From national to local; confrontational 10 years Recognition of union pluralism in 2000

TCTU and DPP From local to national; politicized

Enterprise unions and their employers Strikes, legal and illegal

Unions, employers, and politicians

6 years De facto recognition in 1994 and de jure recognition in 2000

wage increases Actors Process Duration Outcome: Wage growth Wage disparity

Various USD 350 → 2,3531 (6.7-fold increase) 100:111 → 100:1712

Mild protests and political pressuring Various USD 600 → 1,410 (2.4-fold increase) 100:145 → 100:170

workweek reduction Actors Process Duration Outcome: Statutory Actual

CFL, TCTU, DPP, and KMT FKTU, KCTU, and KTC3 Government unilateralism; unions’ Partisan competition; unions’ protest lobbying 3 years, effective from 2004 Less than 1 year, effective from 2001 48 → 44 →40 hours/week 48 → 42 hours/week 52 → 43.4 hours/week4 46.6 → 41.5 hours/week

job protection/ anti-privatization Actors Process Duration Outcome

FKTU, KCTU, and KTC National strikes 1998 –present About 60% of SOEs privatized Lax regulations for layoffs

CFL, TCTU, DPP, and KMT Rallies and lobbying 1996 –present About 30% of SOEs privatized Introduction of protective laws

labor market flexibility5

More flexible 38

Less flexible 46

s o u r c e s : Compiled by the author based on data from the Korea Labor Institute (KLI 2009), the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs (CLA 2009), the Korea Ministry of Planning and Budget (MPB 2003), the Taiwan Council of Economic Planning and Development (CEPD 2002), and the World Bank, accessed on February 1, 2010. n o t e s : 1. The average wage of nonagricultural labor force in 1986 and 2007, reflecting inflation rates. Exchange rates for 1986: USD 1  KRW 950 and USD 1  NTD 25; for 2007: USD 1  KRW 1,200 and USD 1  NTD 32. 2. The wage-gap ratio between firms with fewer than 30 employees and firms with more than 500 employees. In data for Korean wages, the lowest category refers to firms employing 10 to 29 workers; this means that the lowest-paid workers (in firms with fewer than 10 workers) are excluded, consequently inflating the wage level of the lowest category. 3. KTC  Korea Tripartite Commission. 4. The change of the legal workweek from 1986 to 2004. The figures following the statutory workweek are the actual hours worked. 5. This is from the World Bank’s Rigidity of Employment Index, which measures the average of three subindices: Difficulty of Hiring Index, Rigidity of Hours Index, and Difficulty of Firing Index. Each of these indices assigns values between 0 and 100, with higher values representing more-rigid regulations.

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that were followed by unions’ militant mobilization and intense confrontation with the government. Workers’ protests were frequent in workplaces and the streets, but the actual outcomes of these heroic scenes were rather disappointing. Taiwanese unions, on the other hand, achieved less dramatic wage hikes but were effective in gaining union pluralism and shorter working hours while securing several measures for job protection in the context of an increasing outflow of manufacturing and privatization. What was different in Taiwan was the visibility of political parties in these labor-reform politics. Unions used a combination of political lobbying and street mobilization to take advantage of the partisan competition between the KMT and the DPP. More interesting, most of the reforms occurred swiftly and involved a minimal level of militant clash. Compared to their counterparts in Korea, Taiwanese unions were able to achieve significant gains without engaging in costly mobilization, particularly when the unions’ partisan ally, the DPP, was in power from 2000 to 2004. As a result, the overall level of labor-market flexibility remained lower in Taiwan than in Korea. In the following sections I examine the unfolding of each labor-reform episode in Korea and Taiwan by starting from the transition period in the late 1980s, when the legacies of labor control inherited from the authoritarian era created distinctive starting points for labor contention. The subsequent discussion of how each labor reform was articulated, contested, and concluded through the interaction among labor unions, the government, and political parties reveals how the diverging paths of labor politics were created and consolidated in these two nascent democracies.

Labor-Reform Politics in Korea Recognition of Union Rights In pre-1987 Korea and Taiwan, organizing a union and gaining legal status for the union was a process that had been tightly controlled by authoritarian regimes. Because of these restrictions, a full guarantee of union rights emerged as a core democratic reform agenda in post-transition politics. This union-rights agenda encompassed two issues. One was to fully guarantee the right to form unions by lowering the existing legal barriers to union organizing, and the other was to allow union pluralism by granting legal recognition to newly organized federations other than the KCTU or the CFL, which had enjoyed a monopoly status. In both countries, relaxing the conditions of forming a new union was less contested because it was regarded as one of

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ta b l e 5 . 2

Union rights and union pluralism in Korea and Taiwan Korea

Taiwan

Union pluralism

From national to company level NCTU in 1990 KCTU in 1995 → legal in 2000

From regional to national level TCFI in 1994 TCTU in 1998 → legal in 2000

Process

Union organizing → government suppression → strikes or street demonstrations → illegal existence of unions → legal recognition

Union organizing in politically friendly localities → schism between central and local governments → de facto recognition → legal recognition

n o t e s : NCTU  National Congress of Trade Unions (  Jeonnohyeop, the national center that preceded the KCTU); TCFI  Taipei County Federation of Industrial Unions (the regional federation that later developed into the TCTU).

the fundamental freedoms (freedom of association) under democratic government. However, the labor-reform issue regarding the recognition of alternative union centers involved greater contention because such recognition would entail drastic change not only in existing labor relations but also in the power dynamics of contending political actors. However, the reform politics surrounding this labor issue was starkly different in Korea and Taiwan. In Korea the process was protracted and highly confrontational, while in Taiwan it involved unions’ full use of their political opportunities, especially their partisan allies in local administration. Korea’s second national center, the KCTU, gained legal status after ten years of intense confrontation, in contrast to Taiwan’s TCTU, which earned early de facto recognition through aid from the DPP, which was becoming increasingly powerful in both local and national politics. Table 5.2 compares the processes of union-rights expansion and union pluralism in these two democracies. The first round of labor-law reform in Korea took place in late 1987 in conjunction with the rewriting of the Korean Constitution, a revision that instituted direct presidential elections. Negotiations over these institutional changes were carried out by political elites at the expense of excluding the popular sector in the pro-democracy coalition. The revisions were negotiated by a small number of lawmakers from established parties—for example, the Democratic Justice Party, the New Korea Democratic Party, and the ­Democratic Korea Party. Despite the active role played by pro-democracy movement actors and labor unions during the transition period, their reform agenda was not incorporated into the actual negotiation process. Consequently, the labor-law amendment in 1987 failed to remove various legal obstacles

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that had existed in the collective industrial-relations laws (Choi, Jeon, and Lee 2000). Most notably, labor’s core demand to repeal the so-called “three vicious clauses” that prohibited union pluralism, unions’ political activities, and the involvement of third parties in union affairs remained unrealized. Its single achievement was the abolition of the clause that limited union organizing. Enterprise-level unions could now be freely formed, but only one union would be allowed to represent the same shop floor.3 In expanding the freedom of association in the realm of labor unions, union pluralism was a more contested issue than lowering the bar for union organizing. It was anticipated that the recognition of alternative unions, both at the company and national levels, would drastically shift the balance of power within government-dominated labor relations (Choi et al. 2000). The outgoing authoritarian regime refused to recognize democratic unions that existed outside of the government-sponsored national center, the FKTU. For both political and business elites, it was next to impossible to accept independent unions as one of the legitimate collective actors under democratic government (ibid.). Nonetheless, labor-movement groups in Korea organized alternative national federations despite these legal and political constraints because in their view the FKTU failed to function as an organization that represented labor interests. This national-level organizing from the labor side also reflected the centralized structure of Korea’s democratic politics, in contrast to the more decentralized system in Taiwan. The road to gaining union pluralism—in other words, the legal status of alternative national centers—was an intensely repressive, violent, and confrontational process even under democratically elected governments. In 1990 independent unionists formed the National Congress of Trade Unions (NCTU, or Jeonnohyeop) in opposition to the government-sponsored FKTU. The Roh Tae Woo government not only refused to grant the NCTU legal recognition but also subjected the related unionists to fierce methods of repression, such as layoffs, blacklisting, harassment, interrogations, arrests, and jailing (Koo 2001, 178 –79). The police and intelligence agencies were ordered to arrest 262 NCTU unionists, including the chairperson of the new national center (Daan Byungho), while putting several dozen union leaders on a wanted list (KCTU 2001, 159). Remaining unionists responded by organizing wildcat strikes and street demonstrations to protest against the government’s suppression of this new democratic national center. Table 5.3 shows the extent to which Korean workers have been subjected to political repression because of their involvement in union activism. Especially under the Roh Tae Woo government, when the democratic unions

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ta b l e 5 . 3

Korean workers in distress: 1971–2000 1972 –1980

1981–1987

1988 –1992

1993 –1997

1998 –2000

Political regime Park’s Yushin Chun Doo Hwan Roh Tae Woo Kim Young Sam Kim Dae Jung Deaths* 3 17 45 27 — Fired 265 669 1,150 539 376 Imprisoned 27 218 1,974 517 414 KCTU, The History of Democratic Unions’ Struggle and Suppression (2001). *Union activists who committed suicide in protest of extreme labor suppression. In some cases it is suspected that the death was disguised as suicide during interrogation or intimidation by security forces. s o u rc e :

were in their formative stage, 1,150 union activists were sacked from their workplaces while 1,970 were imprisoned because of their involvement in the labor movement. Although unionists’ participation in KCTU organizing was not the sole reason for their prosecution, these figures suggest that political subjugation and workers’ resistance persisted until the late 1990s. There are no comparable data to show the extent of political suppression of Taiwanese workers. However, a number of union activists testify that even during the iron rule of the KMT, police intervention in labor disputes was rare and unionists were hardly ever imprisoned (interviews TW06-1, TA11-M, TS29-M). One set of relevant data that is available is replicated in Table 5.4. The number of workers subjected to political suppression is almost negligible when compared to the Korean experience and reflects that both the ­government and unionists avoided confrontational tactics even during the most turbulent years of Taiwan’s labor movement. To the eyes of Taiwanese unionists, the degree of militant resistance by Korean unionists despite the repressive measures by the government was shocking, if not heroic (ibid.). In the context of such a hostile political environment, the first national center positioned as an alternative to the existing FKTU was finally formed in 1995. The KCTU was formed to present a unified front of independent unions by amalgamating the NCTU (largely based on unions in small- and ­medium-size manufacturing industries), unions in chaebol companies, and unions in white-collar occupations. The KCTU included 862 labor unions and 420,000  union members at the time of its establishment (KCTU Web site, accessed on ­February 1, 2006). Again, the government subjected this national center to severe repression and surveillance on the grounds that a secondary national center was illegal according to the existing Trade Union Act. It was only during the financial crisis of 1997–1998 that the KCTU finally gained government recognition after years of repression and militant confrontation. Both an international– economic condition and a domestic–political

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ta b l e 5 . 4

Taiwanese workers in distress: 1987–1992* 1987–1992 Political regime Deaths Fired Imprisoned**

KMT: Lee Teng-hui — 35   2

s o u rc e :

Adapted from Lee (1994). *Figures for Taiwan are available for this period of time only. But because this time period was when most disruptive actions by unions took place, it can provide a glimpse of how government reacted to union militancy. **The original source uses the term accused without clarifying the level of legal measures involved.

factor led to this reversal. On the one hand, the unprecedented magnitude of the economic crisis forced the incoming government to solicit cooperation from the business sector and labor unions to launch successful structural reforms. On the other hand, the new government, under Kim Dae Jung, signified the first transfer of power from authoritarian elites to a liberal camp with a pro-labor reputation. Right upon assuming the presidency, the Kim Dae Jung administration invited the representatives of Korean employers and national unions to sign a “social pact” in February 1998. It was the first time that the government recognized the KCTU, in addition to the FKTU, as an official representative of labor unions. Still, the actual legalization of the KCTU was not granted until 2000, when the related labor law was revised. Therefore, the legal recognition of this alternative national center occurred after several years of intense confrontation that involved government persecution of union leaders and unions’ militant resistance. From the establishment of the NCTU in 1990 to the de jure recognition of the KCTU in 2000, the reality of union pluralism took a whole decade of contention between the government and organized labor.4 This process of labor-reform politics around the issue of union pluralism illustrates the blatant clash between the central government and independent unions in Korea. Industrial workers took advantage of the political space provided by political democratization by forming independent unions and engaging in collective mobilization, but the authoritarian legacy of criminalizing and repressing autonomous organizing continued under the first two democratically elected administrations. This process also revealed that Korean workers had neither a political party nor any other institutionalized political force to mediate their voice into formal negotiations, consequently making the labor politics of union-rights recognition highly contentious and protracted even under democratic government.

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Wage Increases5 Redistribution is usually one of the most central issues in post-transition politics, and Korea and Taiwan were not exceptions. Demands for wage increases emerged as another contentious labor issue in these new democracies, particularly because of their success in export-oriented manufacturing. Export-driven growth in capital-and-technology-poor economies depends upon wage competitiveness — that is, low wages for manufacturing workers. Preceding authoritarian governments had not only tightly controlled union organizing to preempt political dissension but also directly intervened in labor relations to keep wage levels low. During the decades of rapid economic growth, workers accumulated a shared sense of deprivation that their contributions to their nation’s successful industrialization were being denied and underappreciated. With political democratization, workers organized new unions, and achieving a decent wage level was one of their central demands. Table 5.5 shows the frequency of labor disputes in Korea and the different causes. Workers’ mounting discontent with their material rewards was clearly indicated in the percentage of labor disputes precipitated by wagerelated grievances in the post-1987 period. In Korea wage-related protests (about overdue wages and wage increases) dominated until the mid-1990s. They peaked in 1990, accounting for 54 percent of all labor disputes, and gradually dropped in the following years (Korea Labor Institute 2005). From the late 1990s, disputes frequently arose around collective-bargaining issues, especially regarding job security, more than any other causes. This shift from wage-related issues to a broader set of labor issues reflects two changing aspects of Korean labor relations. First, the effects of economic liberalization on the labor market have emerged as the main concern of labor unions since the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. Faced with increasing levels of flexibility and stratification in the labor market, organized workers came to concentrate their collective efforts on seeking job security. At the same time, it indicated that Korean unions in large conglomerates have gained as much as they can in terms of wages and other company-specific material benefits, leaving unresolved other labor issues beyond the scope of individual firms (Lee, Cho, and Lee 2005). Korean unions, lacking the political channels that could meaningfully influence the direction of socioeconomic policies that would provide minimum protection to all workers, have turned to company-level collective bargaining to secure all possible ­buffers against the risks of liberalizing market conditions.

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ta b l e 5 . 5

Causes of labor disputes in Korea: 1990 –2004 Year

Wage

Layoff

Collective Bargaining

Total

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

177 137 161 77 57 33 20 21 51 62 54 65 46 48 59

18 7 4 1 3 1 — — 3 — 2 — 8 — —

127 90 70 66 61 54 65 57 67 136 194 170 268 272 403

322 234 235 144 121 88 85 78 129 198 250 235 322 320 462

s o u rc e :

Data from the Korea Labor Institute (2006). 1. Wage issues include overdue wages and wage increases; collective bargaining category includes collective bargaining and other issues such as improving working conditions, massive layoffs, company mergers, and unfair change-of-job assignments. 2. Because the disputes caused by massive layoffs due to company closings are included in the category of collective bargaining and no separate numbers are given, it is impossible to combine these disputes with the ones caused by layoffs. notes:

Wage determination in Korea and Taiwan takes place at the company level because both nations have an enterprise union system under which the company-level unions exercise exclusive authority over wage negotiations. However, wage determination in these two nations was not purely decentralized at the enterprise level owing to the legacies of extensive government control and intervention in industrial relations. Because each nation’s growth was based on export manufacturing, the authoritarian regimes in Korea and Taiwan found keeping the wage levels competitive for the international market to be one of their main goals in labor-relations management (Deyo 1989). The regime’s economic bureaucracies invented specific mechanisms through which they could influence wage levels against workers’ rising demands for higher wages. In Korea wage levels have long been affected by the ­government’s “recommended wage guidelines,” whereas in Taiwan the government-­determined wage levels in SOEs set a cap on overall wage levels. Labor unions responded to these nationalized wage interventions by coordinating their wage bargaining under the guidance of national federations to overcome their weakness as compartmentalized union units. Korean unions have concentrated their wage negotiations in the spring season, based on wage-increase recommendations prepared by the KCTU or the FKTU. The

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Korea

Taiwan

30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

figure

5.1  Real wage increases in Korea and Taiwan, 1986 –2007 (1,000 won per

month) s o u r c e s : Data from the Korea Ministry of Labor and the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, accessed on November 15, 2008. n o t e s : These real wages are for manufacturing-sector employees. Wage data for Taiwan are standardized at Korean currency for comparative purposes. Real wages are calculated by dividing nominal wages by consumer price indices. The base year for the Korean consumer price index was 2005; the base year for Taiwan was 2006.

labor-reform politics surrounding wage negotiations in democratized Korea was marked by increasing successes of unions that were mostly organized in large corporations that defied the government-set wage recommendations. Since the political democratization of 1987, Korean unions have engaged in vigorous wage negotiations to make up for the wage suppression they had been subjected to under previous authoritarian governments. Figure 5.1 shows real wage increases for manufacturing workers in Korea and Taiwan. Over the last twenty years, Korean workers were able to push up their nominal wages 3.7 times, while the increase for Taiwanese workers remained less dramatic, roughly doubling the original amount. In terms of real wages as well (reflecting inflation rates in nominal wage hikes), the gap in the wage growth for Korean manufacturing workers and their Taiwanese counterparts shows a similar pattern. With Korea’s average inflation rate of 4.6 percent over the last two decades, the real wage increased about 3.4 times, whereas Taiwan’s moderate inflation rate of 1.9 percent caused the real wage to increase 1.4 times. For Korean unions, the area of wage negotiation has yielded the most successful record for their collective action. The legacy of government intervention in wage determination continued until the early years of Korea’s democratization. The government drafted and imposed “recommended wage guidelines” to cap the wage-increase levels in the competitive manufacturing industries where unions were organized. The

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government announced its wage-increase rates each year based on the economy’s growth rates and urged compliance by employers and labor unions alike by using threats of tax audits or other disciplinary measures to firms that failed to abide by these guidelines. Yet Korean unions were able to defy such a government policy by their “Spring Offensive” called chuntu.6 The KCTU and the FKTU prepared their own wage-increase guidelines and coordinated the collective bargaining of their individual member unions. These wage negotiations were concentrated around the months of March and April every year to magnify the effects of union solidarity. Because most of the unions were organized within large firms, these unions were able to exert their mobilization strength to maximize company-level gains beyond the “recommended guidelines” set by the government. Unions in heavy industry and transportation, such as Daewoo Shipbuilding, Hyundai Heavy Industry, Hyundai Automobile, and Seoul Metro, have been the forerunners in this annual spring offensive, which involved strikes, walkouts, factory occupation, and street demonstrations during the wage negotiations (Choi et  al. 2001). Once favorable wage bargaining was signed in these leading unions, other unions affiliated with each national center could also benefit from increased rates (ibid.). This annual wage bargaining, led by powerful unions and organized in large manufacturing and public-service companies, has contributed to a widening wage gap across firms in the Korean economy. The gap came about because these unions have pushed their wage levels disproportionately higher than the wages of workers employed in smaller, nonunionized workplaces. As shown in Figure 5.2, workers employed in large firms have experienced higher and quicker wage increases than their counterparts in small enterprises. The ratio of 100:111 in 1986 between firms with fewer than 30 employees and firms with more than 500 employees widened to 100:171 in 2004. This implies that workers and unions in large conglomerates have been able to claim their shares of their firms’ profits in the form of higher wages. For instance, two employees (with one in a small company and the other in a chaebol company) that had started with similar salaries in 1986 are now living on quite different paychecks. Their monthly salaries that were about 350,000 won have now diverged into less than 2 million won (approximately US $2,000) for the first person and more than 3 million won (approximately US $3,000) for the second person. Labor unions and employers both contributed to this wage disparity. First, labor unions under enterprise unionism have every incentive to push for increased wages and other benefits because the material welfare of workers

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10–29

30–99

100–299

300–499

>500

3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0 1986

figure

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

5.2  Wage differentials by firm size in Korea, 1986 –2004 (1,000 won per

month) s o u rc e : note:

Data from the Korea Ministry of Labor, accessed on November 15, 2008. Nominal wages in nonagricultural sectors.

d­ epends exclusively on their company-level negotiation with employers. This is particularly more prevalent in developing economies such as Korea, where social-protection programs are underdeveloped and are not able to provide social safety nets to workers hit by labor-market uncertainties. Under these conditions, workers become solely dependent on the remuneration available from their firms. For Korean unions, having neither political allies nor political channels through which they could affect labor and social-protection policy making, company-level negotiations were the sole arena where they could wield their organizational strength and maximize their gains.7 Moreover, union democratization allowed rank-and-file members to replace their union leaders whenever they failed to deliver the expected material gains to their members (Interview KW32-1). With increased internal democracy and direct election of union leaders, unionists tended to choose militant leaders to direct wage bargaining. As a consequence, the practice of militant wage negotiations in unionized firms was responsible for widening the gap in wage levels across firms, further damaging the weak solidarity found among Korean workers. At the same time, the success of wage negotiations in these large conglomerates contributed to retarding the ­development

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of social-protection programs in Korea (Yang 2006). Having secured high wages and other compensation at the company level, the large unions did not have incentives to actively push for national-level social-protection policies that would benefit workers in small, nonunionized firms. This was a typical prisoner’s dilemma situation, where individual unions behaved in their best interests but produced suboptimal outcomes for workers as a whole. For instance, policy directors of the KCTU and the FKTU lamented that ­“although our national centers advocated for universal social-protection programs, we fell short in dissuading the powerful unions from self-serving wage hikes” (interviews KA40-1, KA12-2). On the other side of the negotiation, Korean employers responded to unions’ wage demands in two ways. One method was to continue the denial of unions, and the other was to pacify unions by providing material compensation. Many employers in Korea continued to cling to the idea of “this company is mine” and refused to recognize labor unions as legitimate partners for negotiations and cooperation (interviews KE13-1 and KP31-1). They employed a variety of ways to dismantle unions, including tactics such as dismissing union leaders, using hoodlums to terrorize unionists, and calling in police forces to break workers’ collective actions. Such repressive practices were most prevalent in SMEs, where the fledgling unions were weak, and in some large chaebols, such as Hyundai and Samsung (KCTU 2001). Workers in small firms were particularly more vulnerable to these antiunion practices and had scant organizational leverage to increase their wage levels. Another method that Korean employers used in dealing with unions was to provide material rewards as incentives to break up the unions or to pacify union militancy. As the “variety of capitalism” literature emphasize, employers in the competitive sectors have incentives to reward their skilled labor force to sustain their comparative advantages within the international market (Hall and Soskice 2001). Korean chaebols had both incentives and resources to accede to union demands. In order to maintain their level of competitiveness by compensating core workers, they provided material rewards (in the forms of wages and other company-specific benefits) to their employees. Therefore, Korean employers’ dichotomized responses to workers’ demands for higher wages—that is, union suppression in small firms and concession in chaebol companies—have not only shaped the dynamics of wage bargaining in Korea but have also contributed to the widening wage gap across the different Korean firms. Since political democratization in Korea, labor unions have vigorously engaged in collective action and negotiations to raise their wages, which had

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long been suppressed under developmental authoritarian regimes. This process of unprecedented mobilization by industrial workers demanding higher salaries often involved direct confrontation with employers and government in collective actions such as strikes, walkouts, factory occupations, and street demonstrations. In the end, the unions organized in large conglomerates have been most successful in company-level wage bargaining because their sheer organizational strength has been exercised most effectively (although in a confrontational manner). These collective actions by unions, in conjunction with the interests of the government and employers attempting to contain unions’ demands within company-level material rewards, have contributed to the widening wage gaps between different segments of workers and the underdevelopment of universal social-protection programs in democratized Korea. Workweek Reduction Workers in authoritarian Korea and Taiwan had been subjected to long hours of labor under dismal working environments, which resulted in frequent and severe industrial accidents. An average workweek for Korean workers in the 1980s was 51.4 hours and for Taiwanese workers 47.1 hours (data from the Korea Statistical Information Service and the National Statistics of Taiwan, accessed on February 1, 2006). These were notoriously long hours of labor, especially when compared to 39.3 hours, the average for workers in the ­Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies for the same decade (data from the International Labour Organization, accessed on February 1, 2006).8 With political democratization, reducing the workweek emerged as a major labor-reform issue; it was seen as a step in creating decent working environments for the overworked employees. This issue was more crucial for Korean workers, who labored more hours than did Taiwanese workers. Yet the process of changing the labor law to reduce statutory working hours involved diverging strategies and dynamics. In Korea labor unions clashed with the government’s unilateralist stance and eventually were not able to achieve their goals after protracted negotiations and confrontation. In Taiwan the issue of workweek reduction was picked as an election campaign issue by presidential candidates in 2000. In this highly politicized environment, labor unions were able to attain their demands swiftly and without much antagonistic clash by taking advantage of the partisan competition between the KMT and the DPP. Up to the late 1980s, the weekly work hours that Korean workers actually labored exceeded 50 hours. There were two reasons for such long hours

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of actual labor. Although employers demanded extended working hours to maximize production and to meet shipment deadlines, especially in export manufacturing, workers themselves were in dire need of the overtime pay because their base wages for 8-hour labor were too low. With “long hours and low wages” characterizing the working conditions of most Korean workers in the pre-1987 period, it was natural that shortening statutory working hours emerged as one of the central labor-reform issues. The first revision of the labor law, which had been written under authoritarian regimes, occurred in 1989. This process was exceptionally noncombative for Korean labor because the reform occurred under the short-lived opposition’s dominance in the legislature. Popular fervor for democratization had brought victories to three opposition parties in the first legislative elections, held in 1988, right after the 1987 democratic transition. Together as a majority in the National Assembly, these three opposition parties were able to pass the bill to cut the workweek from 48 to 44 hours despite the resistance from the ruling Democratic Justice Party (Choi et al. 2000).9 It was unusual for Korean labor to achieve its demands without militant clashes. At the same time, it confirms the importance of partisan composition in formal political institutions to have labor’s interests represented. However, the second round, to further reduce the workweek from 44 to 40 hours, emerged as one of the most contested issues in labor relations during the early 2000s. The issue first surfaced in the tripartite negotiation during the Asian financial crisis, which severely hit the Korean economy in 1997–1998.10 During the crisis, the tripartite actors initially agreed to reduce the workweek from 44 to 40 hours to help create more jobs for those who had been laid off. However, the actual discussion to change the pertinent legislation was initiated only in 2000. The negotiations took place in the Korea Tripartite Commission (KTC), which was established in 1998 under the Kim Dae Jung government to serve as a forum to help with negotiations among the government, national unions, and employers’ organizations.11 Three representatives from each party and six delegates representing “public interests” (mostly labor scholars) formed a subcommittee to discuss the specifics of workweek reduction (KTC 2003, 522 –26). The central disagreement was over the pace of the legislation’s implementation. The KCTU demanded a comprehensive implementation of the 40-hour workweek in firms of all sizes, whereas the government and employers’ organizations, especially from the SMEs, rejected such a proposal. The negotiation took almost three years (from April 2000 to October 2002) but failed to produce an agreement from the contending parties.

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In 2002 the government disregarded the preliminary agreements and recommendations made through the tripartite framework and instead submitted a unilaterally drafted bill to the National Assembly. In reaction to this unilateralism, the KCTU called for a strike against the passage of the bill, and this strike was later joined by the FKTU. Labor unions claimed that the government bill would benefit only the large enterprises by delaying the implementation of the 40-hour workweek in small firms until 2010 (KTC 2003). This was the main contention from the KCTU and the FKTU. The deferred reduction of the statutory workweek would have little impact on improving the working conditions of most workers employed in SMEs because more than half of the Korean labor force was employed in firms with fewer than 20 workers (KCTU 2001). National unions claimed that these workers were those who work the longest hours and who needed to benefit from reduced working hours. Despite vocal opposition by two national unions, the government bill was passed in the National Assembly in 2003 and went into effect in July 2004.12 In the National Assembly, where the conservative Grand National Party formed a majority, unions had no political party to represent and support their position. Unions responded with strikes to display their opposition and frustration but again were unable to influence the revision of the labor law. Although the government established the KTC to produce tripartite agreements, the negotiations in the KTC were often bypassed by government decisions. In the beginning, both the conservative FKTU and the militant KCTU participated in the KTC, viewing the organization as an opportunity to partake in the labor policy-making process. In fact, even the militant KCTU’s initial strategy, from the mid-1990s to the early-2000s, was “Let’s fight by participating” (Roh 2008). However, the KTC’s failure to produce a binding agreement and the government’s rushing unilateralism undermined the commission’s institutional authority. As such, Korean unions increasingly perceived the KTC as a façade created by the government to impose its agenda upon labor unions. Their suspicions were confirmed when the government unilaterally submitted its labor bill to the national legislature and disregarded all the tripartite negotiations that had occurred over three years. Since then, the KCTU has withdrawn and not returned to the KTC for tripartite consultations but has chosen to directly confront the government. The conservative FKTU has mostly stayed within the tripartite framework to compensate for its organizational weakness with its traditional political maneuvering strategy. Yet the presence of the militant KCTU has often aided the revolt by the FKTU member unions against the federation leadership that failed to deliver policy concessions (Interview KW21-1).

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It is remarkable that the statutory workweek was shortened from 48 to 40 hours (with limited implementation) in democratized Korea, but the actual working hours in nonagriculture remained at 47.8 hours per week, with an average overtime of 4.3 hours as of 2007, compared to Taiwan’s 45.2 hours with overtime of 2.3 hours (data from the Korea Statistical Information Service and National Statistics of Taiwan, accessed on November 1, 2008). ­Korea’s labor-reform episode around the issue of workweek reduction as discussed here reaffirms the importance of partisan representation of labor to avoid militant mobilization. Korea’s unions first sought to partake in formal negotiations, but when the government acted to dishonor the fledgling tripartism, they once again chose militant activism. With the weak institutional authority of the KTC, the negotiation process was protracted without being able to produce successful outcomes for organized labor. Even when the government chose to pass its unilateral bill in the National Assembly, the KCTU did not have any partisan ally to represent labor’s position. The national unions were unable to exert any type of political influence over such an important labor-reform issue and continued to self-identify as outsiders/ protest actors. This reform episode shows that labor politics in Korea repeated its familiar sequence: government’s unilateralism in the absence of partisan negotiations followed by unions’ militant mobilization. Job Security and Anti-Privatization The labor-reform politics of the post-transition decade was primarily centered on the redress of workers’ grievances that had accumulated under previous authoritarian regimes, such as the right to unionize, the demand for higher wages, and the issue of reducing statutory working hours. With the neoliberal market reforms of the 1990s, the focus of organized labor then shifted to job security and social-protection policies. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 accelerated the economic structural changes of a directly affected economy such as Korea’s and an indirectly affected economy such as Taiwan’s. One of the goals of the structural changes was to increase labormarket flexibility and to privatize public enterprises. Both of these changes involved a massive reduction of full-time jobs and, as such, directly threatened the livelihood of workers and the organizational basis of labor unions. Workers’ reaction to these market changes was particularly pronounced in countries such as Korea and Taiwan because social-protection policies were underdeveloped and did not provide a minimum level of protection to those subjected to the risks of labor-market fluctuations. Moreover, the privatization of SOEs, involving massive layoffs, was a direct blow to newly ­developing

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labor movements that had just begun to benefit from the democratizing political context. Especially because a significant portion of union membership depended on large firms and because the SOEs accounted for a sizable share within the large firms, the threat that the government’s privatization plans posed to the fledgling labor movement was tremendous. However, the pattern of union involvement in the process of job loss and SOE privatization varied and the outcomes differed between these two Asian democracies. In Korea unions’ inclusion was minimal, and national unions failed to secure access to either the formulation or implementation of labormarket restructuring policies. Lacking partisan allies to mediate the conflicts over job loss, unions resorted to militant mobilization to directly confront government measures. Despite labor unions’ fierce resistance to the government’s privatization schemes, workers’ collective mobilization alone was ineffective in securing labor interests within a liberalizing labor market. In Korea the concept of secure employment was regarded as an employment practice norm during the decades of rapid growth but began to dwindle with two structural reforms initiated by the government in the mid-1990s. One was a labor-law reform intended to increase labor-market flexibility, and the other was the privatization of SOEs. Both measures invited strong opposition from the national unions because these reforms threatened the organizational existence of the unions themselves.13 What precipitated and sustained the union opposition to these schemes in Korea was the absence of union inclusion in the policy-making and execution process. It was the central government that unilaterally decided these policy measures. Neither political parties nor other political institutions, such as the KTC, were able to play a meaningful role in representing labor or mediating the conflict of interests. The introduction of economic liberalization to the Korean economy was first initiated by the Kim Young Sam government (1992 –1997), which employed a “segyehwa” (literally meaning “internationalization”) rhetoric to prepare for Korea’s membership in the OECD (Gills and Gills 2000).14 In May 1996 the government created the Presidential Commission on Industrial Relations Reform, with the aim of transforming Korea’s industrial relations to meet the requirements for the OECD application. In the commission’s initial meetings, not only the FKTU but also the KCTU participated despite the latter’s illegal status. However, because the primary goal of this commission was to remove labor-market rigidities, it was hard to produce a meaningful agreement among the tripartite actors who sat at the same table for the first time. Therefore, the first round of clashes between the government and the Korean national unions regarding the issue of labor-market flexibility occurred

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in December 1996, when the government unilaterally passed a pro-employer labor bill in the National Assembly. The conservative New Korea Party (the ruling party from 1996 to 2000) railroaded through a labor bill prepared by the government without even notifying the opposition party (Kim 2004).15 The new law contained clauses to make it easier to lay off workers and to increase the employment of contingent labor forces.16 This unilateral action by the ruling party aroused strong resistance from labor as well as from the general public for two reasons. Many workers and ordinary citizens saw the introduction of the labor-market flexibility clause not only as threatening the practice of secure employment but also as violating democratic procedures in the legislature by the ruling party. The KCTU and the FKTU together called for a general strike for the first time in post–Korean War history. The general strike was organized and lasted for almost a month, from December 26, 1996, to January 22, 1997. Unions in Kia Motors and Hyundai Motors led the strike, followed by unions in public enterprises and white-collar occupations (ibid.). The strike involved more than 200 workplaces, and an average of 200,000 workers partook in daily demonstrations (Choi et al. 2001, 370 – 86). Faced with strong opposition by two national unions that were backed by public support, the government had to agree to withdraw the proposed bill and submit a revised bill to the National Assembly. Ironically, the contents of the revised bill were not drastically altered because the actual power relations in the legislature or in the labor relations remained unchanged. Unions earned their rights to political activities and union pluralism but were unable to change the clauses on easing layoffs and expanding temporary labor contracts.17 Despite the heroic strikes jointly organized by the KCTU and the FKTU, unions were excluded from the renegotiation process of the laborlaw reform. Korean unions did not have a political party to represent labor’s interests in the legislative negotiations. Hence, the strikes failed to produce any tangible outcome in altering the direction of labor-market restructuring. A second government policy that threatened the job security of Korean workers was the privatization of SOEs. Although to a lesser degree than in Taiwan, Korea’s key infrastructural industries, such as steel, power, gas, rail, and telecommunications, have been publicly owned corporations. Table 5.6 compares the changes in the share of SOEs in Korea and Taiwan in terms of their numbers, employees, and contributions to national production. Table 5.7 lists major SOEs and their privatization status. As shown in these two tables, the privatization of public enterprises has been more swift and dire in Korea than in Taiwan. The number of Korean SOEs shrank to a third of their original members, thereby losing a quarter of their employees (a loss of

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ta b l e 5 . 6

SOEs in Korea and Taiwan: 1997–2002 korea

taiwan

Year

Number

Employees

% of GDP

Number

Employees

% of GDP

1997 2002

98 35

212,000   81,000

9 5.3

122 97

280,000 186,000

10.8 9.4

s o u r c e s : Korea Ministry of Planning and Budget (MPB 2003) and Taiwan Council of Economic Planning and Development (CEPD 2002).

ta b l e 5 . 7

Key SOEs and privatization in Korea and Taiwan Korea Privatization National Textbook Korean Tech and Finance Korea Heavy Industry Korea Chemical Pohang Iron & Steel Korea Electric Power Korea Telecom Korea Tobacco and Ginseng Korea Railway Korea Gas

Taiwan Privatization 1998 1999 2000 Closed 2000 2000 2001 2001 Ongoing Ongoing

China Petroleum China Shipbuilding China Steel Tang Zong Iron Taiwan Power Chunghwa Telecom Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Taiwan Railway

Ongoing 2001 1995 Ongoing Ongoing Ongoing 2002 Ongoing

s o u r c e s : Korea Ministry of Planning and Budget (MPB 2003) and Taiwan Council of Economic Planning and Development (CEPD 2002). n o t e : Chunghwa Telecom was privatized in 2005, after the above sources were published.

131,000 jobs). This does not mean that the process met little resistance from organized labor. On the contrary, Korean SOE unions, once regarded as promanagement unions, turned to militant mobilization strategies against these privatization schemes.18 However, they were ineffective in altering the course of SOE restructuring. SOE privatization had been attempted in previous governments, but it was under the Kim Dae Jung administration (1998 –2002) that privatization plans were put into action as one of the economic restructuring measures.19 Prompted by the financial crisis of 1997–1998, the government assigned the Ministry of Planning and Budget (MPB) to oversee the implementation of these privatization plans.20 The MPB organized the Task Force for SOE Privatization, to be led by ten bureaucrats and two privatization experts (MPB 1998). A special commission on SOE privatization was also set up under the KTC to induce union cooperation (Lee and Hwang 2000). However, the interaction among the government, unions, and employers repeated the same patterns found in previous labor-reform episodes: a sequence of a quasi-tripartite negotiations, withdrawals of support by the national unions,

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the government’s one-sided policy making and implementation, and unions’ militant but ultimately ineffective resistance. In 1998 the MPB Task Force designated eleven SOEs (with 143,000 employees) as target corporations for immediate privatization, with a plan of shedding about 20 percent of the workforce. The targeted SOEs included big players such as Korea Electric Power Corporation (34,879 employees), Korea Telecom Corporation (58,556 employees), Pohang Iron and Steel Corporation (POSCO, 19,294 employees), Korea Heavy Industry (7,851 employees), and Korea Tobacco and Ginseng Corporation (7,573 employees) (MPB 2003). In response to the government’s privatization plans, both the KCTU and FKTU participated in the tripartite meetings to negotiate the terms of privatization. Still, unionists and bureaucrats together questioned the role of the KTC as an effective organization for mediating industrial conflict and producing binding agreements. The collective actors involved in industrial relations shared the idea that “the final word regarding privatization was coming directly from the Blue House via the MPB” (Interview KS34-1). Realizing that the tripartite consultation could not affect the execution of the MPB’s predetermined plan for privatization, both national unions pulled out of the KTC (Choi et al. 2001). In November 2001 these two national unions, along with other nongovernmental organizations, formed the Joint Committee Against Privatization. This committee covered major SOE unions with more than 200,000 workers. In February 2002 the unions of Korea Power, Korea Gas, and Korea Railway organized joint strikes against privatization schemes. However, only the Korea Power Union was able to sustain its strike, while the other two strikes were immediately quelled by police surveillance forces, and the union leadership had to call off the strikes ( Joint Committee Against Privatization 2002). The central demand from Korean unions during their collective actions was not an unconditional halt to SOE privatization but a meaningful inclusion of workers’ representatives in order to make the privatization process transparent and to introduce minimal safety measures for laid-off workers. Union demands included union participation, priority of ownership transfers to Korean (not foreign) capital, and job security in the process of selling off the equity of the SOEs (Lee and Hwang 2000). According to Roh Kwangpyo, a labor activist and scholar, what infuriated SOE unions was not the privatization scheme per se (they accepted privatization as an inevitable step) but the exclusion of unions and the government’s shock-therapy-like approach to privatization (2003, 97).

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However, these union demands failed to find institutionalized representation in the processes of privatization policy making and implementation. The MPB maintained that privatization was not an issue to be negotiated between unions and management (ibid.). The tripartite forum under the KTC was ineffective in influencing the MPB plans. It was this government unilateralism and executive supremacy that Korean unions, both the KCTU and the FKTU, militantly resisted. Yet their confrontational mobilization and lobbying activities were unsuccessful in producing any tangible results in terms of altering the course of privatization or securing job protection. Unions in Korea lacked systematic relationships with policy makers and political parties through which they could influence labor policies that would affect their very existence. Despite militant resistance by national union centers and the SOE unions, the Korean government has been successful in carrying out its privatization plans. Job loss for existing public employees, the most contentious issue in the process of privatization, was pervasive. Within a 15-month period, the government was able to shed 31,000 employees from SOEs, either already privatized or in the process of gradual privatization plans (MPB 2003).21 The four labor-reform episodes in Korea as examined here reveal a clear pattern in the nature of interaction among labor unions, the government, and political parties. Korean unions first participate in tripartite consultations (the FKTU more readily and the KCTU with more skepticism) but withdraw when the government attempts to push through its unilateral program. Tripartite negotiations turn sour, and unions resort to militant mobilization such as street demonstrations and wildcat strikes. The engagement of political parties is apparently absent, and organized labor has no political ally to represent its voice in institutionalized politics. The lack of partisan channels to influence the labor policy-making process turns out to be responsible for making the labor-reform process protracted and confrontational, with few tangible results for mobilized national unions.

Labor-Reform Politics in Taiwan Recognition of Union Rights In contrast to the Korean experience, the expansion of union rights and union pluralism in Taiwan was a visibly politicized process involving the politics of rivalry between the KMT and the DPP. First of all, the right to organize a union was not an issue that was as highly contested as it was in Korea. This

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was because the KMT government had adopted a policy to promote union organizing in the 1970s to improve the regime’s democratic image. In 1984 the KMT also introduced the Labor Standards Law in an effort to preempt labor mobilization when opposition politicians (such as the dangwai group) were working to mobilize labor discontent as a confrontation tactic against KMT rule (Y. Chu 2001). Although it is doubtful whether the government was seriously interested in the implementation of this newly promulgated law, the law itself served as a political opportunity for unions and opposition movements to pressure the KMT for the actual implementation of labor standards. This strategy was called “fight for what the law offers” and became the tool for unions and opposition movements to pressure the KMT government in the years leading toward democratic transition (Chen and Wong 2002, 36). With the lifting of martial law in 1987, the most urgent issue for labor was to gain the right to organize unions outside of the officially sanctioned CFL in order to achieve an independent voice free from government control. Labor activists believed that the most effective method of organizing an alternative national center besides the CFL was to begin at the regional level. In the words of a unionist actively involved in this movement, “We strategized that if we formed independent union federations in localities where the DPP was dominant, there would be less political repression from the central government under the KMT” (Interview TW06-1). This strategy was expected to take full advantage of political protection from the DPP (the then-opposition party), which had begun to expand its influence in several local governments. Aiding the formation of independent unions was also congruent with the political interests of the DPP. From the DPP’s view, the weakening of KMT-controlled unions (such as the CFL) meant a decline of the KMT’s influence in local electorates (Ho 2006, 116). This would yield expanded opportunities for the opposition party, which was vying for its eventual national dominance. In the mid-1990s, union activists began to organize regional federations in the localities under the political control of the DPP and exploited the schisms and competition between the KMT-dominated central government and the DPP-controlled local governments. The first democratic union outside of the government-sponsored CFL was the Taipei County Federation of Industrial Unions (TCFI), established in Taipei in 1994. The CLA, as the central labor ministry, declared that the TCFI was illegal according to the Trade Union Law, which stated that only one single regional or national union federation outside of the company level was permitted. Nevertheless, the DPP-­ dominated Taipei County government granted the TCFI legal recognition against the CLA’s warnings (Huang 2002, 316). In the following years, unions

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ta b l e 5 . 8

Taiwan’s independent union federations at the city/county level City/County

Year of Establishment

Taipei County Tainan County Kaohsiung County Yilan County Taipei City Kaohsiung City Hsinchu County Miaoli County

1994 1995 1996 1997 1997 1997 1997 1998

Number of Unions Partisanship of Local Government and Members Local Executive Subsidies (NT$)* 38 (12,000) 35 (10,000) 39 (10,000) 21 (6,000) 49 (47,000) 36 (45,000) 21 (47,000) 13 (7,893)

DPP DPP DPP DPP DPP KMT DPP Nonpartisan

2,300,000 600,000 700,000 240,000 410,000 820,000 N/A 100,000

s o u rc e :

Laodongzhe (1998). *NT$1  US$0.03.

in other counties and cities followed suit and submitted applications to their respective local governments. As Table 5.8 shows, among eight regional federations organized by 1998, six of them were established and granted recognition in counties and cities where the DPP was in power.22 Moreover, the amount of subsidies these regional federations received from their respective local governments was quite significant. Therefore, the political shield and material resources from a partisan ally in local governments was of crucial importance for the newly emerging labor unions in Taiwan. The expansion of the TCTU unions further benefited from the administrative schism between the national and local governments. Although the CLA, Taiwan’s labor ministry set up in 1987, was in charge of labor policy making and execution, local governments could maintain their relative autonomy from the central government. Unlike the Korean Ministry of Labor, the CLA has no direct administrative branches at the local level. Instead, the labor bureau (laogongju) in local governments is responsible for labor policy under its local jurisdiction. In theory, when the CLA enacts labor policies, local labor bureaus are expected to execute them. However, because these bureaus are under the authority of the city/county government and are accountable to the city/county council, they can act independently and bypass the labor policy set by the central CLA (Interview TB07-1). Therefore, once the DPP gained control over a local administration, the local labor bureau could act as an agency to recognize and protect the alternative unions that were against the labor law set by the national government. Based on the regional federations formed under friendly local governments, the TCTU was formally established in May 1998 as the national-level independent union center. The formation of the TCTU was also a direct

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violation of the existing Trade Union Law. Yet, because of the opposition party’s protection of the TCTU unions, the KMT government was not able to engage in blatant repression as in the case of the Korean government with the KCTU. Finally, when Chen Shui-bian ran in the 2000 presidential election as the DPP candidate, he included the language of “co-determination” in his campaign against other conservative contenders (Lee 2004).23 Along with other pro-labor policy promises, Chen pledged during his campaign that he would grant legal status to the TCTU once he was elected. Indeed, when he won the presidential race in 2000, he granted de facto recognition to the TCTU even before the related labor law was amended. The fact that the legal standing of an alternative labor federation was a part of Taiwan’s presidential campaign is in clear contrast to the presidential races in Korea. An examination of the expansion of union rights and the formation of independent unions in Taiwan reveals that the process was highly politicized on account of the political rivalry between the KMT and the DPP both at the local level and the national level. Independent unions significantly benefited from the mediation of an opposition political party that shielded the unions from repression by the central government. They took full advantage of the schism between the central government under the KMT and the local governments under the DPP, which provided critical political spaces for the fledgling unions. Gaining legal status from the local level, the TCTU earned legal recognition when the presidential candidate of its aligned party won the presidency in 2000. As such, the process of obtaining union pluralism was rather quick (six years in Taiwan compared to ten years in Korea) and visibly placed within partisan competition in democratized Taiwan (compared to confrontational clashes in Korea). Wage Increases Beginning in the mid-1980s, when the KMT government introduced the Labor Standard Law, Taiwanese workers started to increasingly engage in collective action for decent remuneration. Their demands included the payment of overdue wages, higher wages, overtime compensation, year-end bonuses, and other labor rights stipulated in the labor law but not honored by management ( J. Chu 2001, chapter  3). As summarized in Table 5.9, wages and bonuses have been the key issues in Taiwan’s labor disputes in the last twenty years. In Taiwan, although the categories of labor disputes’ causes differ from those of the Korean data set, disputes occurred most frequently and increasingly over wage- and benefit-related issues.24 The frequency increased from 25 percent

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ta b l e 5 . 9

Causes of labor disputes in taiwan: 1989 –2004 Year

Wage

Layoff

Collective Bargaining

Total

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

489 418 528 557 548 643 761 891 738 1,321 1,953 3,127 3,895 6,190 5,536 5,289

944 990 1,046 1,033 1,059 1,141 1,219 1,510 1,423 2,251 3,339 4,433 6,800 7,514 6,427 5,312

510 452 236 213 271 277 291 168 439 566 568 466 260 313 241 237

1,943 1,860 1,810 1,803 1,878 2,061 2,271 2,659 2,600 4,138 5,860 8,026 10,955 14,017 12,204 10,838

s o u rc e :

Data from the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, accessed on March 1, 2006. Because Taiwan’s labor dispute data use different categories, they are rearranged to be comparable to the Korean dispute data. Wage issues include wages, overdue wages, and overtime payment; layoff category includes labor contract and retirement; collective bargaining includes work hours, benefits, labor insurance, management, occupational hazards, safety and health issues, union, and others. notes:

in 1989 to 35 percent in recent years. These data are indicative of the nature of labor relations in Taiwan. Unions at the company level are preoccupied with wage and job-security issues but have relatively few reasons to fight for collective bargaining because many related issues are resolved through the mediation of political parties either at the local level or the national level. Korean unions employed their mobilizational strength to maximize their gains in wage increases at the company level, but wage bargaining in Taiwan involved different dynamics and mechanisms. Although the legal bargaining unit for wages and other benefits was the enterprise union, Taiwanese unions lacked direct collective-bargaining experience with their employers. Instead, they relied on a politicized and informal process of wage bargaining, especially within the SOE unions, by taking advantage of their linkage to elected politicians and relevant bureaucracies. Figure 5.1 shows that real wage growth for Taiwanese workers was rather modest compared to their Korean counterparts. In terms of real wages measured by either the nominal wage divided by the consumer price index or the nominal wage adjusted by inflation rates, the hike was under 200 percent over the last two decades. Also, the wage disparities between large and small firms, as shown in Figure 5.3, are less conspicuous in Taiwan than in Korea.

Labor-Reform Politics 500

60,000 55,000 50,000 45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000

1986

figure

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

5.3  Wage differentials by firm size in Taiwan, 1986 –2004 (NTD per month)

s o u rc e s : note:

Data from the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, accessed on November 15, 2008. Nominal wages in nonagricultural sectors.

The ratio of 100:145 in 1986 between firms with fewer than 30 employees and firms with more than 500 employees widened to 100:170 in 2004. Compared to the Korean ratio (from 100:111 to 100:171),25 wage gaps between small and large firms in these two countries are almost identical. However, a comparison within the same period of time (1986 –2004) shows that the gap grew more rapidly in Korea than in Taiwan. The greater gap in Taiwan than in Korea in the 1980s was associated with the dual structure of the Taiwanese economy. Employees in the large SOEs were better paid with numerous benefits, yet the wages for workers in small firms were kept low to be competitive in the exporting market. Twenty years later, Taiwanese workers gained not only lower real wage growth, but they also experienced less disparity in their wages depending on the company size over the last two decades. Such differences in the patterns of wage increases can be explained by the distinctive wage-determination mechanism in Taiwan, which involves political and informal negotiations among unions, government bureaucracies, and elected politicians. First, Taiwanese unions are generally known to be less involved in direct wage negotiations, thus having less of a direct impact on wage levels (Lee 1994). This was attributable to the extent of state penetration into shop-floor labor relations and labor incorporation, which was more complete than in Korea. As discussed in Chapter 3, labor unions under these

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circumstances operated with little autonomous bargaining power and lacked collective-bargaining experience. At the same time, there has been greater involvement of the government in the wage-determination process owing to the central role of the unionized SOEs in the Taiwanese economy. The government used public enterprises as its showcase of decent wage levels and other material benefits, while leaving the working conditions of private firms to be determined by market mechanisms (ibid.). With such a legacy in place, Taiwanese unions predominantly organized in SOEs have perceived wage negotiations as part of a political bargaining process and have been able to take advantage of the partisan relations among competing political parties. With limited experience in direct mobilization for wage and collective bargaining because of the KMT’s penetration into union affairs, labor unions in democratized Taiwan continued to rely on informal wage negotiations at the company level. Unionists present their most urgent requests to xiezhuhui, an equivalent of work councils, in which union representatives, employers, and local politicians or bureaucrats participate. When they fail to get employers’ concessions over wage demands, Taiwanese unions resort to the following alternatives: (1) discontinue the negotiation and bring up the requests another time, (2) mobilize “quickie” strikes that last for several hours to put pressure on their employers, or (3) earn the support of local government officials in charge of labor relations (usually the labor bureau official) or politicians (usually local or national legislators) and let them put pressure on their employers instead (ibid., 7–9). These patterns of wage negotiations in Taiwan are less dramatic and confrontational than in Korea, but they are more efficient and practical considering the extent of state incorporation of Taiwanese unions and their lack of direct bargaining experience with employers. Another way through which the wage determination takes a politicized process is observed in the SOE wage policy. SOEs in Taiwan constitute the backbone of the economy as well as the union movement. However, because they are public enterprises, their wage levels are determined by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) and not by the management of individual enterprises. This does not mean that unions have been irrelevant in wage negotiations. They try to coordinate wage negotiations within the SOE unions with a common proposal drafted by the TCTU or the CFL. Yet their bargaining strategy has been indirect but politicized by taking advantage of their linkage to elected politicians. In wage negotiations, unions contact their partisan allies, who are usually national legislators serving on the budget and economic committees of the Legislative Yuan. Unionists request that these legislators put pressure on MOEA officials in charge of

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SOE wage settlements. According to Chien Hsi-chien, former DPP legislator who served two terms (1996 –2001), “Elected politicians are more susceptible to union demands than appointed ministry officials and do place pressure on the MOEA through their party channels” (Interview TP16-1). Both the CFL and the TCTU-affiliated unions are known to engage in this practice of involving party politicians (ibid.). As such, this process of wage settlement is not as dramatic and confrontational as in Korea, but it constitutes a distinctive wage-negotiation mechanism through which SOE unions exert their political clout. This pattern of SOE wage negotiation has the effect of equalizing wage levels among SOE workers as well as setting the wage levels for workers in private sectors. Wage increases directed by the MOEA apply to most of the SOEs and reduce the wage differentials among SOE workers. Furthermore, because Taiwanese SOEs have been closely integrated with export-oriented private firms by providing them with intermediary goods (such as power, petroleum, steel, and plastic), their wage levels trickle down to those employed in these private firms. Beginning in the mid-1990s, many of these SOEs began to undergo privatization, and direct negotiations between unions and employers over wage issues are on the rise. Still, the government remains as the largest shareholder of privatized SOEs as well as the pacesetter for their privatization. This means the MOEA remains as a central negotiator with unions, contributing to the less drastic increases but also the greater homogeneity in wage levels found among the Taiwanese working population, particularly in the SOEs. However, such politicized wage negotiations consequently reinforce the weakness of Taiwanese unions in demanding better wages and engaging in collective bargaining. Workweek Reduction The statutory workweek emerged as a major labor-reform issue in democratized Taiwan and as a step to creating decent working conditions. This issue surfaced around the same period of time as in Korea, but it was initially about a reduction from 48 to 44 hours. This was due to the fact that Taiwanese workers actually labored fewer hours than their counterparts in Korea. Since the enactment of the 1984 Labor Standard Law, which set the statutory workweek at 48 hours, the actual workweek for Taiwan’s ­nonagricultural labor has been falling below 48 hours (data from the National Statistics of Taiwan, accessed on November 1, 2008). Yet when the issue of amending the workweek clause for a further decrease emerged in 2000, the labor politics

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involved drastically different dynamics. In a pattern similar to that found in preceding labor-reform episodes, both the CFL and TCTU took full advantage of intensifying partisan rivalry in the democratizing political environment. As a result, labor unions were able to achieve a workweek reduction to 42 hours (84 hours every two weeks), which was above their initial demand of 44 hours. The labor-reform process was swift, without much antagonistic clash with government authorities, and the role of political parties and their partisan competition was evident. In contrast to the Korean experience, where labor issues rarely become a central campaign agenda, in Taiwan workweek reduction surfaced as a key campaign issue during the 2000 presidential election. Such a politicization of a labor-reform issue was associated with the nature of partisan competition within the presidential race and the relationship each party sustained with labor unions. First, Chen Shui-bian, the DPP candidate with a pro-labor reputation, framed his labor policy as “co-determination” and campaigned on the “two-day weekend” slogan in the election campaign (Lee 2004).26 Given the traditional linkage between the DPP and the TCTU unions, Chen expected to gain workers’ votes by advocating a pro-labor stance. Chen’s campaign proposal was to allow workers to work five days every other week (alternating with a 48-hour workweek) starting in 2001 and five days every week starting in 2002 (Huang 2002). In this election, there was a third presidential contender, James Soong, in addition to the KMT candidate, Lien Chan. Soong joined the presidential race as an independent candidate after losing the KMT presidential nomination to Lien, and Soong eventually formed a splinter party, the People First Party. Despite Soong’s conservative political stance, he also proposed a reduction of legal working hours during the presidential campaign. Competing in a close race against Chen, Soong wanted to turn the labor issue of workweek reduction into his valence issue.27 Such partisan competition over the workweek issue during the presidential election created a favorable bargaining condition for Taiwanese unions. The preexisting ties between political parties and labor unions further contributed to the politicization of the workweek-reduction issue. Presidential candidates were aware that they had to appeal to the union constituency because the national unions were able to mobilize their members to support a certain candidate (Chuang and Sun 2002). For the TCTU unions, the 2000 presidential election signified the possibility of electing Chen Shui-bian, their long-standing partisan ally, into the presidency. With James Soong competing in a close race against Chen, the CFL rallied around Soong.28 A former DPP

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legislator with connections with the TCTU described this partisan relationship as follows (Interview TP16-1): Unions may not be able to make a political candidate win or lose the election, but they definitely can make the candidate look nice or ugly in the general electorate. And politicians are aware of this.

Because of this political leverage of labor unions, presidential candidates made promises to respond to union demands in a competitive manner. Chen Shuibian finally won the presidency as the first opposition leader in Taiwan and assumed power in March 2000. Soon after his inauguration, Chen invited the leaders of the CFL, the TCTU, and various employers’ associations29 to negotiate over workweek reduction. In June 2000 the negotiation ended with an agreement on a 44-hour workweek (an alternation of 40-hour and 48hour workweeks). The agreement was praised as the first tripartite consensus in Taiwan’s history (Huang 2002). Although labor unions agreed to this proposal, they had hoped for a more drastic reduction in statutory working hours. They formed the Coalition for 84 Work Hours and placed pressures on the DPP government while also lobbying other political parties (Huang 2002, 22 –23). This time, the KMT responded by rejecting the government bill and proposing a more progressive revision. The KMT, which lost the presidential election while maintaining a majority in the Legislative Yuan, wanted to make up for its loss in the presidential race by responding to unions’ demand. With the party’s majority status in the Legislative Yuan, the KMT passed its own revised bill that stipulated 84 hours every two weeks. The DPP government attempted to overturn the KMT bill by passing the original bill, but it met fierce opposition from labor groups organized around the Coalition for 84 Work Hours. The coalition and the CFL rigorously negotiated with the KMT to defend the KMT bill. The final settlement at the end of December was that the KMT version would remain intact and be put into practice starting in January 2001. The coalition achieved its goal of an 84-hour limit, ironically thanks to the KMT’s rivalry with the DPP. All public enterprises and nearly a third of private firms are known to observe this new law (Chuang and Sun 2002). This process of workweek reduction in Taiwan shows some drastic differences from the process that unfolded in Korea. Most notably, it became a politicized and partisan issue during the presidential campaign. The following negotiation involved major political parties and national unions, and it was completed in less than a year. Both the CFL and the TCTU actively participated in pressuring and negotiating with the government and political parties.

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These unions were able to benefit from tripartite consultation and the partisan competition between the DPP and the KMT. The outcome was a reduction of the workweek. This was an achievement made possible because of the preexisting partisan relations between national unions and political parties as well as the political competition between the parties, which had switched their positions as the ruling party and opposition party of the Taiwanese government. Job Security and Anti-Privatization With increasing economic liberalization since the 1990s, job security has emerged as a vital labor issue in Taiwan. On the one hand, workers in the SMEs were affected by capital relocation abroad, particularly to mainland China. On the other hand, the government’s plan to privatize public enterprises and cut redundant workforce affected the workers in the SOEs. Especially because Taiwan’s national unions were more exclusively based in the SOEs than was the case in Korea, the threat that the government’s privatization plans posed to the fledgling labor movement was tremendous. Both the CFL and the TCTU unions were adamant in denouncing massive job losses and privatization plans. These unions, again, took advantage of existing partisan divisions and competition and relied on a combination of lobbying and mobilization strategies to place pressure on their partisan allies. Through the aid of partisan negotiations, Taiwanese unions were successful in securing institutionalized representation and influence in the labor-market-restructuring process. Beginning in the early 1990s, the job security of Taiwanese workers was threatened as enterprises underwent radical restructuring efforts, which involved downsizing, plant closings, hiring freezes, early retirements, and wage reductions (Chen et  al. 2003). In particular, increasing plant closings precipitated by massive capital relocation emerged not only as a labor issue but also as a social problem. The number of plant closings soared to an average of 5,361 per year in the 1990s, compared to 3,511 in the 1980s (Asia Monitor Resource Center 2000). Companies moving offshore were not limited to labor-intensive industries but also included high-tech and capital-intensive industries. Workers affected by capital relocation and factory closings were primarily in SMEs, where the national unions had few organizational bases. Collective actions against factory closings were mostly spontaneous and organized by laid-off workers demanding severance and pension payments. As disruptive mobilization marked the months of 1998, labor activists and trade unions (loosely networked to be formally organized into the TCTU) formed a representative voice to pressure the KMT government to enact protective mea-

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sures. Particularly, labor activists and the opposition DPP politicians politicized this issue against the KMT government. Because of the DPP’s minority status in the Legislative Yuan at the time, it was unable to pass the Factory Closure Law that it had drafted, but it was successful in pushing the Executive Yuan to approve the Protective Measures for Laid-Off Workers in 1999 (Asia Monitor Resource Center 2000). These measures included penalties for employers who lay off more than a third of their employees within six consecutive months. What is noteworthy in this experience, compared to the Korean case, is the politicization of a labor issue through the involvement of an opposition party. The issue of SOE privatization began to emerge in 1989 under the KMT government. The weight and influence of SOEs in Taiwan’s economy have been more significant than in Korea, particularly because the KMT regime saw public enterprises as a bulwark against multinationals and domestic conglomerates when pursuing its industrialization policy in previous decades. The KMT, as a minority regime, wanted to keep a grip on key industries in order to attenuate the economic empowerment of big indigenous capitalists. Yet extensive state ownership had been blamed for a range of economic and political pitfalls, such as SOEs’ general inefficiencies, the stifling of market competition, and the illegal flow of SOEs’ finances back to the KMT as black money. Under the party–government–SOE nexus, the KMT was one of the richest parties in the world (McBeath 1997). As such, it was the DPP that initially raised the privatization of SOEs as a political issue against the governing KMT. The DPP saw cutting the flow of political funds from the SOEs to the KMT and its politicians as a crucial means of undermining the political power of the KMT (ibid., 1150). Faced with political pressures and an economic rationale, the KMT government arranged for the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) to take charge of the privatization program. The CEPD set up an ad hoc organization, the Steering Committee for Promoting the Privatization of SOEs, to coordinate and oversee the privatization process.30 In 1996 the Steering Committee selected 42 of 122 SOEs for immediate privatization, but only 6 of the 42 targeted SOEs had undergone transfer of ownership by the end of 1997 (CEPD 2002; see also Table 5.7). The process of privatizing SOEs in Taiwan was highly politicized and prolonged but involved less direct confrontation between the government and SOE unions. Because of partisan rivalries and pressures from labor unions, neither the KMT nor the DPP was able to push through a unilateral privatization plan, as happened in the case of Korea.

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The distinctive feature in the politics of privatization in Taiwan was that national centers and SOE unions were able to take advantage of their partisan linkages and the clash of interests among various political actors torn by partisan competition. The first tier of interest conflict was between the CEPD and the elected legislators at both the national and local levels (McBeath 1997; Dean 2002). When the CEPD steering committee prepared privatization plans based on economic calculations, the bill had to pass the Legislative Yuan. In the Legislative Yuan, however, individual politicians from both the KMT and the DPP were subject to immense pressure and lobbying efforts by the SOE unions. Legislators were worried about losing union support along with the loss of too many jobs in their constituencies. Moreover, national legislators themselves were usually unwilling to relinquish the political influence and pork-barrel perks that came with controlling big public companies (Dean 2002, 46). At the local level, regional assembly members refused to cooperate with the government plans for privatization because they wanted to cling to their influence in hiring and promoting the employees within their constituencies (McBeath 1997, 1158). A conflict of interest was also clearly visible between political parties. Until 2000, when the KMT was in power, the opposition DPP was advocating the reconsideration of privatization programs. When the DPP assumed the presidency and ruling party status in 2000 and attempted to privatize SOEs, the KMT became a strong opponent of privatization. Because of existing linkages with labor unions, both the KMT and the DPP were limited in unilaterally pushing the privatization scheme. For these competing parties, losing the support of SOE unions meant that they were losing important sources of political patronage. Although it was under the KMT government that the first privatization plans were drafted, the party did not show full commitment to SOE restructuring. The KMT was torn between the economic rationale for privatization and political aversion to losing the support of the CFL-affiliated SOE unions, particularly when the party’s popularity was in decline (Dean 2002). The delayed privatization of SOEs reemerged under the Chen Shui-bian government. However, Chen often had to announce postponements of the scheduled privatization plans because of union pressures and a lack of support from legislators inside and outside his own DPP Party (Chou 2000). Most importantly, the traditional ties that have linked the DPP and the TCTU made it hard for President Chen to pursue a vigorous privatization scheme. The DPP government was particularly reluctant to upset the labor unions that helped the party capture the presidency and a majority in the Legislative

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Yuan. The role of the Chunghwa Telecom Workers’ Union was particularly critical in forcing the DPP government to make concessions to union pressures. This union, as a key member of the TCTU and a DPP supporter, threatened to withdraw its partisan loyalty if the Chen government pushed through its privatization schemes (Interview TW33-1). Seizing on these clashes of interests among political actors and institutions, SOE unions have been able to capitalize on such divisions regarding privatization schemes with threats of switching partisan loyalties. In 1999 these unions formed the Alliance of SOE Labor Unions with other SOEs under the leadership of the Chunghwa Telecom Union.31 Their mobilization strategy was moderate and strategic compared to the direct militant clashes between SOE unions and the government in Korea. Taiwan’s SOE unionists tactfully combined rallies and lobbying. They organized demonstrations in front of the Legislative Yuan while contacting and pressuring the seventeen legislators on the budget and economics committees at the same time (McBeath 1997). When interviewed, SOE union leaders were confident that their electoral clout could be effectively used in pressuring legislators (interviews TW33-1 and TW35-1). Such tactful activities by SOE unions enabled them to gain institutionalized representation in the process of privatization. The CLA formed the Committee to Oversee SOE Privatization and invited labor unions to voice their concerns and negotiate the terms of privatization. The committee consisted of six professional scholars, seven civic-sector representatives, and five labor-union leaders (CLA Web site, accessed on November 15, 2008). By voicing their concerns and negotiating their interests in this consultative body, unions were able to push the government to write very liberal transfer and pension-protection provisions into the privatization bill (McBeath 1997). By the end of 2000, the Legislative Yuan passed the Statute Governing the Privatization of SOEs, which serves as the legal basis for Taiwan’s privatization policy.32 The statute regulates the basic obligations and rights of all ­parties—the government, SOE managers, and their employees—involved in the privatization process. A noteworthy aspect of the statute is that it includes a section on the legal protection of employees’ rights and interests, such as provisions for layoffs and pension rights during the transfers to private ownership (Pao, Wu, and Pan 2008). Most importantly, the law stipulates that a fifth of the seats on the SOE board of directors should be given to union representatives and that any plan for privatization should earn the approval of the SOE board of directors. This means that privatization in Taiwan is technically impossible without full consultation with and support from the unions.

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Taiwanese unions have been able to gain important concessions in the process of labor politics regarding job protection and anti-privatization. With the introduction of the Protective Measures for Laid-Off Workers and the Statute Governing the Privatization of SOEs, labor unions were effective in minimizing the impact of sudden and massive layoffs and securing institutionalized representation and favorable pension transfers in case of privatization. Such achievements were possible because of unions’ traditional partisan linkages and their strategy of using the partisan competition between the DPP and the KMT that switched the KMT position from a ruling party to that of an opposition party. This chapter analyzes labor politics around four labor-reform episodes—­ recognition of union rights, wage increases, workweek reductions, and job security/anti-privatization—in democratized Korea and Taiwan. For each labor reform that involved the reformation of existing labor policies, the process in Korea was a confrontational and protracted battle between the unions and the government. Although each of these reforms required a revision in the existing labor law, the absence of mediation by political parties was apparent. The continued absence of partisan allies and the unions’ status as an institutional outsider reinforced the militant orientation of Korean labor unions and placed them in constant confrontation with the government, which was seeking to push through its unilateral program. Under these political conditions, unions have largely been ineffective in securing meaningful representation and concessions in labor-reform politics. In the area of union rights, it took ten years of government repression and persecution for Korean workers to obtain legal recognition of an alternative national federation, the KCTU, in 2000. National unions underwent three years of participation in tripartite consultations to reduce weekly working hours, but the outcome was the unilateral passage of a government bill in 2003 that did not reflect unions’ demands. Years of militant mobilization attempting to enhance job security and gain favorable conditions of privatization in the late 1990s and early 2000s resulted only in limited gains. The only area where Korean unions have been effective was company-level wage bargaining, where their mobilization experience paid off. Yet the material benefits accrued primarily to workers in large firms represented by unions, increasing the gap between these workers and workers in unorganized small firms. In contrast, Taiwanese unions concentrated on using their traditional partisan linkages inherited from the authoritarian period. With political ­democratization, the partisan rivalries between the once-dominant KMT and the newly rising DPP as well as the rifts between the national and local gov-

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ernments intensified, and labor unions took advantage of these opportunities in advancing their interests in labor-reform episodes. As such, labor reforms in Taiwan were highly politicized, with labor unions and political parties actively participating and negotiating under intense partisan rivalry. Regarding union pluralism, the TCTU, the national center to challenge the monopoly of the CFL, began to be organized at the local level, where the dangwai politicians exercised increasing political control. Six years of political maneuvering with minimal confrontation with government authorities secured the legal status of the TCTU in 2000. In revising the statutory workweek, the presidential candidates and the competing political parties bargained with the two national unions to produce the enactment of favorable workweek-reduction legislation within several months of competitive negotiations in 2000. In the area of job protection and anti-privatization as well, unions’ tactful combination of protests and lobbying secured the introduction of protective measures to guarantee labor unions’ institutionalized representation within SOEs under privatization schemes. Yet a labor-reform area where Taiwanese unions have been less successful is bargaining for wage increases. Because of their lack of experience in company-level collective bargaining procedures, Taiwanese unions have gained a less dramatic rise in wage levels. The examination of these four labor-reform episodes reveals the development and reinforcement of diverging patterns of labor politics in Korea and Taiwan: Korean unions engage in militant confrontation, whereas Taiwanese unions rely on partisan moderation. Through these experiences over the last twenty years, Korean unions have remained an institutional outsider, whereas Taiwanese unions have positioned themselves as an institutional insider. As a consequence, Korea’s organized labor, despite its dramatic militancy and resistance, was unable to halt the government push to increase flexibility in the labor market. Measured by the difficulty of hiring, the rigidity of working hours, and the difficulty of firing the workforce, Table 5.10 shows that Korea’s labor market has higher levels of flexibility (or lower levels of rigidity) compared to the labor-market conditions in Taiwan. Today, workers in these two democracies are paid higher and work fewer hours, and their unions are more legitimately acknowledged compared to the past decades, when they were under authoritarian regimes. However, the varied gains they enjoy or still struggle to achieve depend on what kind of democracy they live in. Democratic politics, its representative and inclusive mechanism in particular, does matter for the advancement of labor rights and interests because workers and unions are political actors and labor policies are more often outcomes of political negotiations. Thus, having a political party

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ta b l e 5 . 1 0

Rigidity of Employment Index for Korea and Taiwan Rigidity of Employment Index A. Difficulty of Hiring Index B. Rigidity of Hours Index C. Difficulty of Firing Index

Korea

Taiwan

38 40 40 30

46 20 40 40

s o u rc e :

Data from the World Bank’s Rigidity of Employment Index, accessed on February 1, 2010. This index measures the average of three subindices: Difficulty of Hiring Index, Rigidity of Hours Index, and Difficulty of Firing Index. Each of these indices assigns values between 0 and 100, with higher values representing more-rigid regulations. note:

to represent labor interests is of crucial importance for labor unions, especially when market forces are increasingly hurting the labor-market conditions. To revisit the quotation that opened this chapter, the Korean labor movement that is portrayed as strong and militant in the media may not be as strong as it appears. Without political representation in a democratic system, labor unions remain an institutional outsider; as such, their effectiveness in influencing national-level labor policies remains significantly limited. Therefore, Korean unions, despite the dramatic scenes of street demonstrations and factory blockades, have deeper and more bitter experiences of failure and defeat that only reveal their political weakness under democratic government.

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Conclusion

What is the relationship between liberal democracy and authentic rule by the people? Ruth Berins Collier, Paths Toward Democracy

Organized labor has been studied as an important political actor in comparative research on Europe and Latin America. The scholarly attention to labor in these studies was a reflection of the historical conditions developed in the polities, such as early industrialization and concurrent formation of modern democratic institutions, the growing population of industrial workers and their demand for enfranchisement, and the electoral success of leftleaning parties and the construction of the welfare state. Therefore, workers and unions were viewed as critically shaping the politics and policies of their own society. However, labor in Asian studies has received relatively scanty focus. Aside from Korea, Asian labor is woefully understudied to begin with. This is even more pronounced in the literature available outside of research conducted in vernacular languages. Furthermore, labor in the Asian context has more often been approached from an economic perspective. This is understandable because it was the Asian economic miracle (and later its crash) that captured the initial interest of academic scrutiny of the region. In this literature, Asian workers were largely viewed as a hardworking, acquiescent workforce with no palpable political claims. One of the epistemological motivations that led to this study was to reconcile the dichotomy between politicized labor in the West and depoliticized labor in Asia. I wanted to “bring Asian workers back,” not just as one economic factor that has contributed to Asia’s astonishing economic rise but as a political actor that has engaged and negotiated in the making of democratic politics. The labor movements in Korea and Taiwan

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may not have been as massive and dramatic as those observed in Europe or Latin America in earlier decades, but they have obviously formed themselves into visible political actors during the last twenty years of democratization. This study was further motivated by skepticism about the idea that labor interest can be viewed as intrinsic or universal. Workers are typically viewed as tending to mobilize for higher wages and better working conditions. However, historical and comparative studies teach us that workers’ collective action has been motivated by a far greater diversity of discontent, which depended on who the workers saw as the primary cause of their hardship. “Equal enfranchisement,” “Freedom of association,” “Down with dictatorship,” “Anti-apartheid,” “We are not machines,” and “Ethnic justice” were the phrases that frequently appeared on the pickets held in the hands of striking workers in different nations in different historical times. Their interests and identities were contingent upon the process of economic and political development and interactions with other collective actors. Depending on how authoritarians subjugated workers and labor unions, their interests and identities have taken different terms. And the working people’s identity, culture, and allies formed during the “critical juncture” period, as defined by Collier and Collier (1991), have had lasting effects on defining subsequent mobilization and interactions. In this study I sought to identify the historical contours through which union movements came to embody their specific interests and identities in Korea and Taiwan. The political and economic experiences under authoritarian governments critically shaped workers’ discontent and collective imagination. For Korean workers, it was resisting an oppressive regime, both at the state and shop-floor levels, through militant mobilization because of their experience of violent repression and inhumane treatment. In Taiwan, class tensions were manifested through an ethnic prism where Taiwanese workers prioritized gaining ethnic justice against KMT dominance with the aid of opposition parties. Once this identity and this culture were formed, taking a less traveled path became a distant, if not infeasible, possibility in the subsequent stages. Another impetus for this study on East Asian labor movements was to broaden our understanding of democratic politics by probing the place of organized labor within democratic institutions. Electoral contestation is one of the widely used criteria to count democracies and nondemocracies for large-N comparisons, but there is growing disillusionment and criticism of such a narrow understanding of democracy (Tilly 2007; Przeworski 2010). Democratic systems offer varied possibilities for, and limitations on, the rep-

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resentation of citizens in general and particularly of specific sectoral groups. Workers organized into unions have divergent experiences in building coalitions with other collective actors, forming linkages with political parties, and consequently having access to policy-making institutions. Political parties, in particular, play a crucial role in representational democracies despite the growing discontent and skepticism regarding their actual effectiveness in the contemporary period. Political parties are the agents that gain a popular mandate to represent and execute citizens’ interests into public policies; as such, the way they operate critically defines the quality of democratic governance. Therefore, the linkages formed between organized labor and political parties are crucial determinants in understanding unions’ place within democratic institutions. By examining the relationship between democratic politics and organized labor, this study explicates the different degrees of representation and inclusion that each democracy offers to union actors. This understanding can proffer new insights into the strength and weakness of democratic politics by identifying the conditions that produce the insiders and outsiders of democratic institutions and the accruing consequences of such representational disparities. Driven by these perspectives, this book has explored the origins, processes, and outcomes of militant unionism in Korea and partisan unionism in Taiwan during the last two decades of democratic experience. I have argued that the continued militancy of Korean unions originates from authoritarian exclusion and the absence of partisan coalitions to represent labor interests in democratic politics. The exclusionary control strategies used by the Korean developmental state to contain labor activism and political opposition did not only radicalize political dissenters but also brought workers and opposition groups together. Therefore, Korean workers with little experience in resolving labor grievances within and through institutional politics came to project a radical vision of labor politics, both in their interests and in their modes of mobilization. Furthermore, unions have remained as electoral outsiders for most of Korea’s democratic experience. This is largely because of the failure of party politics and party representation. Korean political parties, organized along regional divisions, have failed to develop into representative agents that are sufficiently organizationally stable and programmatically able to mediate labor interests into institutional politics. These political configurations reinforced the established norm of union-centered militant mobilization and drove union actors out of the formal political process. As unions found no mediating political forces to articulate their interests, labor-reform politics became

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highly confrontational and futilely protracted. Although unions’ mobilization capacities were instrumental in raising wages and benefits at the company level (where unions are organized), the lack of partisan allies to channel labor interests into formal politics limited the unions’ effectiveness in national policy changes involving issues such as union rights, workweek reduction, and anti-privatization campaigns. Unions clashed with democratic governments that were introducing neoliberal measures to undermine the structural and organizational basis of labor unions, but the unions exhibited little actual efficacy in affecting the course of change. In the case of Taiwan, workers’ experience under the KMT regime was selective incorporation combined with ethnic discrimination. Unions under the conservative umbrella of the CFL developed a norm of party-dependent unionism. Taiwanese workers who identified their grievances more as ethnic injustice were led in another direction. With the emergence of a political opposition with nativist claims, later to be formally organized into the DPP, workers’ discontent merged into the anti-KMT, pro-democracy forces led by an opposition party. With these experiences, both of the national unions relied more on their partisan allies than on militant mobilization and learned to resolve their grievances through political channels. Moreover, Taiwan’s democratization magnified these political opportunities and emboldened the leverage of labor unions; the KMT and the DPP emerged as highly competitive and stable political parties vying to capture the central and local governments. Organized labor was induced into formal political processes with the aid of partisan allies and sought to enhance its interests through political maneuvering strategies between the competing parties. Under increasing political rivalries between the KMT and the DPP in democratized Taiwan, labor-reform politics became highly politicized but void of militant confrontation. Unions were able to secure policy concessions in national labor reforms. In the area of union pluralism, workweek reduction, and anti-privatization campaigns, Taiwanese unions took full advantage of their partisan allies and were successful in defying the practice of single unionism, gaining a significant reduction in the statutory workweek and introducing protective measures against massive layoffs and privatization. Yet Taiwanese unions have been less successful than their Korean counterparts in their company-level wage demands, which require mobilizational strength in terms of dealing with employers. Because of their lack of experience in collective bargaining and direct mobilization at the enterprise level, the overall gains in wages and other benefits have been rather modest. However, while Taiwanese unions were able to gain some policy influence through their par-

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tisan allies, it is doubtful whether unions with continued dependency and weakening protest capacities will be able to keep the loyalty of their political partners. The central claim of this comparative study is that the most crucial factor in harnessing organized labor’s militancy is partisan representation. Because democracy is a system that purports to provide representation and inclusion to previously excluded social members, labor activism in nascent democracies such as Korea and Taiwan cannot be fully explained without examining labor’s place in democratic politics. Having a partisan ally is of crucial importance for organized labor to become an institutional insider because political parties are the primary agents that provide representation and policy influence in representative democracies. For unions that are denied these democratic channels, streets become the venue to raise their voices. Continued labor militancy and unstable labor relations, in this sense, reveal a lot about the failures of party representation and the narrowness of democratic institutions. Some observers may find the militant resistance routinely practiced by Korean labor unions to be a manifestation of labor strength and a heroic struggle for labor’s cause. This study has shown that this is not necessarily the case. Streets filled by clashes between unionists and police forces or production lines stopped by union strikes rather represent the institutional weakness of the labor movement. These dramatic street scenes do not translate into labor’s ability to affect the policy-making process. Korean unions do not have political parties, programmatic and stable, to take labor/distributional issues to the National Assembly. Therefore, labor militancy reveals the failure of Korea’s democratic politics to include and represent one of the most visible collective actors in its society. When a democratic system fails to incorporate a significant actor such as labor unions, this act is not without consequences. The prolonged existence of disgruntled outsiders leads to an erosion of institutional stability and democratic legitimacy. Moreover, volatile industrial relations often hurt the national reputation and market environment for investment, which can further undermine the already shaky ground for labor unions. Most sadly, once the politics of the past and present have created the conditions for labor militancy and labor unions have settled in to such a culture of radicalism, the costs become so high that it is hard, if not impossible, to switch to an alternative path of union activism. Unions have invested organizational resources, developed expertise, and nurtured ideational norms in militant mobilization. Under these circumstances, union leaders are hesitant to advocate possibilities of moderation and negotiations for fear of losing their reputation for resoluteness among their union constituency. Union

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members have shown their willingness to replace acquiescent leaderships that fail to deliver company-level rewards, the only area where unions have been successful, with more recalcitrant leaders. Political parties also face high reputational and electoral costs when they build linkages with unions that have already established themselves as radical opponents. Party elites fear that the median voter would exit, and there is uncertainty regarding how many votes unions would be able to add in. Even if there exists a well-intended pro-labor party, such as the DLP in Korea, it takes time to build a political party that is electorally viable, organizationally stable, and programmatically progressive to be able to represent labor interests in the legislative processes. Moderate unions such as the ones in Taiwan, on the other hand, might be disparaged from the perspective of the radical left for their dependence on partisan allies. Yet, despite less dramatic street scenes, Taiwanese unions chose an efficient method to compensate for their organizational weakness and enhance their interests by securing access to institutional politics through their partisan friends. Without these partisan ties, they would not have been able to garner policy concessions in national labor-reform politics. Additionally, the Taiwan experience highlights an important aspect of the relationship between political parties and labor unions. Whereas the existing literature has identified leftist ideologies and social-protection policies as the primary bond that brings parties and unions together, the linkage found in Taiwan departs from these established understandings and follows another route. The DPP that came on the side of labor unions is not a leftist party in the traditional sense. The ideological glue that connected the party and unions was the notion of ethnic justice, which prevailed with the majority of Taiwanese working people. Therefore, this experience speaks to alternative paths other than traditional leftist ideologies through which labor unions are able to gain partisan representation. Nonetheless, the institutional insiders, such as the Taiwanese unions, are not without their own predicaments. Most of all, labor unions with partisan relations are most likely to pursue the policy status quo or policy change to guarantee the interests of their own members. Unless unions are broadly organized, the successes of institutional insiders will accrue to the insiders only. This would obviously leave out many workers who are not represented by labor unions, especially those who are in the most desperate need of social protection and political representation. For labor unions, it may be smarter to be an insider through partisan allies than to be an isolated outsider. But it would be even wiser for unions themselves to represent as widely as possible by incorporating the most unprotected segments of the working population.

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Organizing broadly is a tough call for labor unions because any action for collective endeavor involves the complexities of coordinating divergent and conflicting interests. Yet any narrowly based organization can soon degenerate into a self-serving institution. Another caveat regarding party-dependent unions is the sustainability of their partisan relations when the political-economic environment turns adverse. For Taiwanese unions, it is particularly questionable whether their partisan ties can survive when the ethnic division, the ideological or ethnic bond that has brought unions and opposition parties together, loses its electoral strength and most of the ethnic-injustice issues have been resolved. Moreover, when structural changes and economic downturns create negative conditions for labor unions, it is doubtful if these partisan labor unions would be able to sustain themselves. Unions in Taiwan, with their long tradition of partisan reliance, have been weak in developing union organizations and mobilizing their members for militant action when necessary. Thus, without developing the “muscles” to enforce the partisan relations, labor unions are putting themselves in a sinking position. Both militant unionism and partisan unionism trace their origins from the unique path of political development of Korea and Taiwan, respectively, but they commonly speak to the limitations and possibilities of democratic politics. If our understanding of democracy is not limited to regular and fair elections but extends to “movement toward greater breadth, equality, consultation, and protection of mutual rights and obligations between citizens and governmental agents” (Tilly 2005, 129), labor’s engagement in this process is a revelation of the strength or weakness of the democratic system and the kind of public policy it produces. The constellation of political parties shows who they represent and what they can deliver. And it is through these political parties that union actors, as one of the most visible collective actors in developing democracies, gain the status of institutional insider and contribute to an expansion of the democratic space. Against the buzz phrase “the end of labor,” labor is taking new forms, with greater levels of diversification and stratification in the contemporary capitalist economy. A decline of traditional industrial sectors, the privatization of public enterprises, diversification and specialization within service sectors, an expansion of informal and contingent labor, the increasing feminization of informal labor, and a rise of migrant workers are commonly observed trends in recent decades. These differentiations, hierarchies, and instabilities within labor create new sources for grievances and discontent that existing labor unions and political representatives are asked to address. Also, these changes

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that place workers under deteriorating labor conditions require democratic institutions to respond with socioeconomic policies that provide at least minimum protection to working people. As such, labor issues will continue to pose challenges to organized unions, politicians, and policy makers. True, changing market structures constantly undermine the organizational bases of labor unions. But this very “race to the bottom” presents a new labor agenda and challenges as to whether and how these issues are addressed and settled within democratic politics. Labor has and will pose hard questions in politics, particularly in democratic politics, and to those students who explore the relationship between democracy and labor.

Appendix A

Interviews and Participatory Observations

ta b l e a . 1

Composition of in-depth interviewees Interviewee Worker/unionist Labor activist Scholar Employer Bureaucrat Politician Total

Korea

Taiwan

6 17 15 2 2 5 47

14 10 17 5 7 2 55

n o t e : I spoke with several dozen workers/unionists during my participatory observations in Korea and Taiwan, but I do not count them here because the interactions were closer to casual conversations than formal interviews.

ta b l e a . 2

Participatory observations Korea The annual congress of the KCTU The annual congress of the FKTU Educational workshops for new unionists (organized by the Korea Labor and Society Institute) Conferences organized by the Korea Labor Institute Conferences organized by the Korea Employers Federation

Taiwan The study tour for “Taiwanese Corporate Responsibility and Civil Society” The reunion gathering of the Shinkwang strike unionists Meetings of the SOE union representatives Meetings of the bank unions Meetings of the TCTU

150

Appendix A

Interview Data Interview Coding Each code for an interviewee consists of two parts. The first part of the code denotes the interviewee’s nationality, occupation, and assigned number. The first letter for nationality is either K (Korean) or T (Taiwanese). The second letter is the interviewee’s occupation coded in the following way: W for worker or union cadre, A for labor activist, S for scholar, E for employer or manager, B for bureaucrat, and P for politician. Sometimes the occupation letter is followed by another letter in parentheses, which denotes the interviewee’s secondary occupation/area of expertise. The last number in the first part of the code is a two-digit number created as part of my own reference system to keep count of the number of interviewees. This number goes up to 47 for Korea and 55 for Taiwan. This means that I interviewed 47 and 55 people, respectively. The second part of the code shows the number of interviews that were conducted. This number is between 1 and 3, but for interviewees with whom I interacted more than three times I designated the letter M, indicating multiple interactions. For example, if a code for an interview appears as KS(A)11M, it means that the interviewee is a Korean (K) scholar (S) and activist (A), who happens to be my eleventh interviewee (11) in Korea, and I interviewed the person more than three times (M). Interview Process For in-depth interviews, I prepared a standardized set of questions and probed into certain topics depending on the occupation and expertise of the interviewee. Each interview, except on several exceptional occasions, lasted about two hours. In some cases, the initial interview was supplemented with e-mail correspondences for follow-up questions. Interviews with Koreans were conducted in Korean. Interviews with Taiwanese were conducted either in English or Chinese with an English translator because my Chinese was not fluent enough to conduct such academic interviews. A small number of interviews were conducted in Chinese with a Korean translator. Interview Recording Depending on the preference of the interviewee, about half of the interviews were tape-recorded and later transcribed. For the remaining interviews, I took as many notes as possible.

Appendix A

151

In quoting the interviews in this study, I tried my best to present the originality of the sentences as they were conveyed by the interviewees through the English translations of their statements. Most of the interviewees’ data are cited by their codes instead of the real names of the interviewees. On certain occasions, with the consent of the interviewees, I do use their real names and organizational affiliations.

Interview Questionnaires Interviewee’s Background • Biographical information • Years of involvement in union activities or union-related work • Brief introduction of the organization • Position in the organization General Observations of National Labor Relations • How would you describe the current situation of labor relations in (Korea or Taiwan)? • How are the current labor relations different from those of the past, when the nation was under authoritarian rule? Changes in Labor Relations • What were the greatest achievements for (Korean or Taiwanese) workers and labor movements since the democratic transition? • Material conditions: wage levels and working conditions • Recognition of workers’ rights and unions • Labor-law reforms • Social-protection programs • What were the factors that made such achievements possible? • Unions’ struggles • Political democratization • Economic growth • Company’s competitiveness (firm size, industrial sectors, and management styles)

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Appendix A

• What, if any, do you think (Korean or Taiwanese) workers have lost or failed in regard to industrial relations of the past fifteen years? • What are the central labor issues for (Korean or Taiwanese) labor movements today? Relationships with Other Political Actors • Has the role of the government in labor relations changed? If yes, how? • Which part of the government is most directly related to your union (organization)? • Do you have regular access to that government organization to present your concerns? • Does your union (organization) have any affiliation with political parties? • If yes, how would you describe the relationship? What do you give and take? Are the interactions effective in gaining what the union (organization) demands? • If no, why do you think there is no relationship? • How do you evaluate political parties in (Korea or Taiwan)? • Which party did you support in the last election? • Have the roles of employers (and their organizations) changed in industrial relations? • What were the responses of employers during the changing labor relations? • What is the relationship between unions and democratic-movement organizations?

Appendix B

National Legislators’ Career Background (NLCB) Data

Basic information about the profile of national legislators for Korea is available from the Web site of the National Election Commission (http://www .nec.go.kr/sinfo/index.html and http://www.nec.go.kr:7070/abextern/ index.html) and the National Legislative Election Report compiled by the National Election Commission (http://u-lib.nanet.go.kr:8080/dl/Search Index.php). Similar information for Taiwan is available from the Web site of the Legislative Yuan (http://www.ly.gov.tw). These data were accessed in the months of June and August of 2009. These NLCB data compiled basic information about legislators elected from 1988 to 2008 (13th to 18th National Assembly) for Korea and from 1991 to 2007 (2nd to 8th Legislative Yuan) for Taiwan to cover the national legislators elected under democratic rule. Basic information includes gender, party affiliation, district or party list, elected year, education, and career background. Elected legislators are required to provide information about their career background, and these data coded this reported career information. This reported information may not always best represent the politicians’ actual profession because they have incentives to report what they want to be viewed as by the electorate. For instance, some of the Korean legislators would rather report being a part-time lecturer than an NGO activist because the former looks like a more legitimate and appealing profession when running in elections. Such a bias may exist in the Taiwan data as well. To maintain consistency in the data coding, I tried to best represent the reported profession.

154

Appendix B

The categories and coding for career background were as follows: • Party politician: national legislator or position in political parties • Bureaucrat: position in government administration • Businessperson: working in the business sector • Lawyer: attorney, prosecutor, or judge • Journalist: working in print or broadcast media • Educator: teaching in elementary/secondary schools or college • Local politician: local legislator or administrator (governor, mayor, etc.) • Civic activist: working in nongovernmental organizations for a public cause (excluding interest groups such as medical doctors’ associations) • Labor unionist: union representative or labor activist • Military/police officer: professional service in the military or police • Aborigine: a category for Taiwanese legislators but not for Koreans • Other: careers that do not fit into the above categories The coding of Taiwanese legislators was assisted by Edward Hsu, graduate student in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California–San Diego, in August 2009.

Notes

chapter one

1.  For economic growth, see Haggard (1990); Amsden (1989); Wade (1990); World Bank (1993); Krugman (1994); and Woo-Cumings (1999). For political democratization, see Cheng (1989); Cheng and Haggard (1992); Cheng and Kim (1994); S. Kim (2000); Diamond and Kim (2000); and Rigger (2001). 2.  The case study approach is defined as the detailed examination of an aspect of a historical episode to develop or test historical explanations that may be generalizable to other events (George and Bennett 2005). 3.  Research travel to Korea was in the summers of 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2008, and research travel to Taiwan was in the spring of 2003, the summer of 2004, and the fall of 2008. chapter two

1.  According to the labor-dispute data descriptions available from LABORSTA Internet, International Labour Organization, the U.S. data exclude work stoppages involving fewer than 1,000 workers and lasting less than a full day or shift. Japan excludes work stoppages lasting less than half a day. Germany, on the other hand, includes work stoppages lasting less than one day if more than 100 workdays are not worked (http://laborsta.ilo .org, accessed on December 1, 2008). 2.  Unless specified otherwise, the labor data used in this section come from the Korea Ministry of Labor’s Labor Statistics (http://laborstat.molab.go.kr) and the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs’ Labor Statistics (http://www.cla.gov.tw), accessed at different points in time in 2007 and 2008. 3.  Detailed discussion on democratic transition appears in Chapter  3. See also Diamond, Linz, and Lipset (1989); Haggard and Kaufman (1995); Choi (1996); Kim (2000); Tien (1996); and Dickson (1997).

156

Notes to Chapter Two

4.  Chaebol is a Korean term based on the Chinese characters used for zaibatsu, Japan’s prewar big-business groups. In postwar Japan the zaibatsu were dismantled because of their involvement in the imperial war and were reorganized into the keiretsu, which refers to large interconnected business groups. Although the term chaebol is frequently used in journalism and academic writings, it has no legal definition. The Korea Fair Trade Commission officially uses “large enterprise groups,” instead of chaebols, to refer to firms possessing total capital of 400 billion won (US $350 million) or more (http://www.ftc .go.kr/, accessed on April 30, 2007). 5.  Most of the data in this study will be within this time framework, unless specified otherwise. Because of data discrepancies, some data are not available for certain years. In these cases I did my best to locate the most approximate data. 6.  The upper limit for a manufacturing SME in Korea is 300 employees, whereas in Taiwan it is 200. For commerce and services, the upper limit is greater in Taiwan (at 50 workers) than in Korea (at 20 workers) (Korea Federation of Small and Medium Business: http://stat.kfsb.or.kr, accessed on April 30, 2007; Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs 2003). 7.  Because Samsung is a huge, diversified business group, it is hard to claim that all firms under Samsung have been union free. There were attempts to organize a union in several companies within the group, but these unions were either dissolved or remained as “ghost unions” thanks to the management’s effort (in coordination with government agencies) to bribe or threaten the initial unionists. Samsung advertises that its labor– management relations are “so perfect” that there is no need to have a union within the Samsung Group (“Unions, Impossible in Samsung,” Hankyoreh21, September 18, 2003). 8.  A large-scale privatization scheme began in 1989, but the process was dwindling and cycling between business concentration and reprivatization. Since then, the importance of SOEs and their share in the economy’s production have been declining. The intricate politics of privatizing SOEs in Taiwan will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5. 9.  Because the performance of the SOEs was closely tied to the international competitiveness of Taiwanese exporting industries, there existed a mechanism that sustained the industrial productivity of Taiwan’s SOEs. Because of their strategic connectedness with export industries, Taiwanese SOEs remain relatively competitive compared to those in other countries, most notably in former socialist economies. 10.  “Cases” mean the number of investment contracts. 11.  Union authority is meant to assess the extent to which national, industry, and shop-floor unions wield authority in wage bargaining when compared to the other two. The index of union authority includes questions such as whether or not the union appoints leaders at lower levels, signs its own wage agreements, has its own strike fund, has veto power over wage agreements signed by affiliates, participates in bargaining at lower levels, and has veto power over strikes by affiliates. A positive answer indicates greater union authority and a negative answer the reverse. 12.  Statistics used here are from the MOL and the CLA: http://laborstat.molab.go.kr and http://www.cla.gov.tw (accessed on December 1, 2008). 13.  This means that these unions are not involved in traditional union activities such as collective bargaining and collective actions to improve wages, working conditions, or workers’ rights. 14.  Prior to 1995, when the national health insurance program was launched, the government had not even required occupational unions to verify their members’ working

Notes to Chapters Two and Three

157

status. Therefore, many people, working or not, joined the unions because of health insurance incentives (Huang 1999). 15.  There is another, indirect way of estimating union coverage. Since the democratic transition in Korea, it has become a labor-relation norm for most unions to conduct collective bargaining and sign an agreement every two to three years. This means that the percentage of workers covered by collective agreements and the percentage of unionized workers would be quite close, around 10 percent of the working population. In the case of Taiwan, the official data indicate that 281 out of 1,104 industrial unions (25 percent) have collective agreements. Because industrial unions organize about 10 percent of all paid workers, it can be estimated that 2.5 percent of industrial workers are covered by collective agreements. 16.  The first independent union organized outside of the CFL was the Taipei County Federation of Industrial Unions (TCFI). The TCTU was formally recognized in 2000. 17.  As of 2007, there were eight national confederations in Taiwan, but only the CFL and TCTU remained as meaningful national union centers. 18.  The percentages do not add up to 100 because there are some independent unions that do not belong to either of these national confederations. For Taiwan, the numbers have been calculated based on information from printed and online brochures of national unions and double-checked in my interviews with unionists and labor activists. 19.  The FKTU has 23 industrial federations, and the KCTU has 16 industrial federations. These industrial federations cover most of the manufacturing sectors as well as white-collar and professional sectors. 20.  This does not mean that the mode of union mobilization culminates in inescapable policy outcomes. The analysis of union strategies cannot completely explain labor-policy outcomes because labor-policy areas vary from wages to social welfare to union rights and labor-market flexibility. Each policy change involves a different set of actors, political institutions, and financial resources. Therefore, even an identical union strategy in the context of different labor-policy areas is not expected to produce the same outcome. 21.  For an analysis of the relationship between political institutional opportunities and social movements’ capacity to translate their agenda into policy outcomes, see Kitschelt (1986). chapter three

1.  Conservative politicians and business leaders who had collaborated with the Japanese formed the Korean Democratic Party in September 1945 (Cumings 1997). 2.  Although the English name of the FKTU has remained the same, its Korean name was Daehan nochong when it was first organized and then changed to Hankook nochong when it was reorganized by the military junta in 1961. 3.  The revision prohibited unions from collecting political funds or using union dues for political purposes. 4.  The Saemaeul movement was a campaign launched in 1970 to develop rural communities and to modernize the agricultural sector. Park’s Yushin regime intended to replicate this policy in the industrial sector. 5.  The KCIA was later renamed the National Security Planning Board and has now been renamed again as the National Intelligence Service. 6.  For a detailed discussion of Korean labor movements in the 1970s and 1980s, see Lee (1990); Ogle (1990); Choi (1997); Koo (2001); and KCTU (2001).

158

Notes to Chapter Three

7.  They were pro-democracy student activists who “transplanted” themselves into factory towns. Some voluntarily dropped out of college, some graduated, and some were expelled from their college for being involved in anti-authoritarian government activities. 8.  Because of the “underground” nature of this endeavor, the number of studentsturned-workers is not exactly known. A conservative estimate is a few hundred, whereas an ambitious figure goes up to several thousand. According to a classified document in 1986, the intelligence agency had collected a list of 700 students-turned-workers and suspected that there were about 10,000 such “disguised workers” in factory towns nationwide (Hwa 2005). 9.  Although minju nojo undong was the most widely circulated phrase, there were other, similar qualifiers, such as independent unionism (  jaju nojo) and militant unionism (  jeontujeok nojo), to describe the new labor movement in Korea. 10.  Although the exact number is unknown, it is estimated that between 18,000 and 28,000 Taiwanese were killed in this incident (Wang 2001). 11.  In most Taiwanese unions, the rank-and-file elect directors (lishizhang), directors elect two or three standing directors, and these standing directors take turns presiding over union affairs. The KMT imposed this indirect election of union presidents to guarantee the election of pro-KMT unionists and to minimize the possibility of rank-and-file revolts. The party was also involved in the selection of candidates for the directorship (Interview TA03-M). 12.  The Central Standing Committee consists of 31 members selected from the 150-member Central Committee. For instance, Hsieh Shen-shan, the president of the CFL, served in the Central Standing Committee in the 1980s. Later, he was appointed to chair the CLA, the government-level labor ministry (Tien 1989, 79 – 80). 13.  Chiang Ching-kuo served as premier of the ROC from 1972 to 1978 and as president from 1978 until his death in 1988. 14.  Because the members of the Legislative Yuan and the National Assembly had been elected in mainland China, they held lifetime tenure in Taiwan. Supplementary elections were introduced to fill the seats left vacant by deceased representatives. 15.  Before democratization, opposition movements under the umbrella of the dangwai were divided by ideological and philosophical differences concerning how democracy should be achieved in Taiwan (Wu 1995, chapter 4). The New Tide faction represented the more radical element within the party. The faction tried to cultivate support from farmers, workers, and college students while rejecting any compromise with the KMT regime and seeking fundamental reform via mass mobilization. On the other hand, the Formosa faction and the Mainstream faction represented the party moderates and pursued negotiation with the KMT regime and piecemeal reforms by participating in the electoral process. 16.  Another labor group is the Labor Rights Association (LRA), which evolved into the labor wing of the politically unsuccessful Workers’ Party (WP). The Workers’ Party was formed in 1989 after splitting from the Labor Party (LP), established in 1987 by Wang Yi-hsiung, a legislator of the DPP. Neither the LP nor the WP holds an elected seat in the national legislature owing to each party’s ideological impracticality as well as the electoral laws that set high entry barriers for new parties (Copper 1993; Buchanan and Nicholls 2003). A third labor-movement group is the Workers’ Legislative Action Committee (WLAC), which was formed as a broad alliance of new independent unions demanding legal reforms. This is the only labor group with no party affiliation (Interview TA21-2).

Notes to Chapters Three and Four

159

17.  Taiwan’s opposition also experienced a brutal suppression in 1979 in the so-called Kaohsiung Incident. About 100 opposition leaders were arrested and imprisoned. 18.  In the 1985 legislative elections, a total of 92 two-member districts were contested. It was a single, nontransferable voting (SNTV) system, with a nominal component of proportional representation. The two-member SNTV helped elect at least one candidate of the authoritarian ruling party in each district, and then the party could garner two-thirds of the at-large seats according to the nominal proportionality rule. This system was rather “disproportional” because one-half of the proportional seats (46) were allocated to the party that won the most district seats. This rule increased the disproportionality between votes and seats distributed to political parties (Park 2002). 19.  Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung earned 28 percent and 27 percent of the popular votes, respectively. 20.  Members of the Legislative Yuan who had been elected in mainland China in the 1940s continued to hold their offices when they relocated to Taiwan and were called lifelong senior members. Beginning in 1969, supplementary elections took place to fill the vacancies created by deceased life-term senior legislators or to select new representatives for additional seats created in the legislature after 1972. 21.  The revised Constitution stipulated that the Legislative Yuan, the National Assembly, and the Control Yuan be fully elected by citizens of the “free area” of the ROC—in other words, Taiwan. The roles of the National Assembly, the Control Yuan, and the Examination Yuan were reduced in subsequent constitutional amendments to bring Taiwan’s institutional arrangements closer to a typical democratic system based on three powers. 22.  Before the revision, it was the National Assembly that (indirectly) elected the president to a six-year term. 23.  Although the National Assembly in Korea is the national legislature, in Taiwan it was not. Taiwan’s National Assembly performed two major functions before the constitutional reform: The first was to amend the Constitution, and the second was to elect and recall the president and vice president. chapter four

1.  In a public speech on his first day of work as a national legislator, June 5, 2004. Daan chaired the KCTU in the 1990s and entered the National Assembly via a Democratic Labor Party ticket in 2004. 2.  It is hard to categorize the ideological positions of political candidates or political parties in Korea because it has been their regional bases, not their policy programs, that have defined their primary identities. The language of “left–right” has also been avoided owing to the presence of deep-seated anticommunist sentiment in South Korea. Most commonly used terms for political parties are conservative, middle-way, and progressive (bosu, jungdo, and jinbo). 3.  Cho Hyung-je, expert on the subject of industrial relations in the Ulsan area, interview by author, January 21, 2010, San Diego, California. 4.  For a detailed discussion, see Park (2007). 5.  In Korean, it was termed minju versus ban-minju (“democracy versus anti-democracy”). 6.  Each candidate’s vote share in the region and the deviation from the national mean are as follows: Roh Tae Woo in Daegu (70.9 percent, +34.3) and North Gyeongsang (66.7 percent, +30.1); Kim Young Sam in Busan (56.1 percent, +28.1) and South Gyeogsang (51.5 percent, +23.5); Kim Dae Jung in Gwangju (94.4 percent, +67.4), North Jeolla

160

Notes to Chapter Four

(83.6 percent, +56.6), and South Jeolla (90.3 percent, +63.3); and Kim Jong Pil in South Chung­cheong (45.2 percent, +37.1). Calculated based on election-results data from the Korea National Election Commission, accessed on February 1, 2009. 7.  Beginning with Park Chung Hee, authoritarian leaders were from a region called Daegu-Gyeonsang, where they set developmental priorities and poured in disproportionate resources in order to build political support bases. Opposition leaders such as Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Pil represented the regions that had been excluded from this developmental favoritism. 8.  Party institutionalization is not necessarily the same as party system institutionalization. Although the institutionalization of single parties contributes to the overall institutionalization of the party system, there can be discrepancies between the two dimensions (Randall and Svåsand 2002). In this study, party institutionalization is understood as the sum of the institutionalization of individual parties. 9.  Under the single non-transferable vote system (SNTV) used in Taiwan until 2004, parties nominate multiple candidates in multimember districts. This electoral rule requires political parties to be effective in deciding how many candidates to field in each district to maximize the number of ­winning seats. Also, candidates from the same party have to compete against one another while coordinating the spread of supporting votes among themselves. This electoral rule has prompted candidates to develop linkages with specific social or interest groups so that each candidate secures a certain number of votes in each election. As in Japan in the pre-1994 period, this has been a source of clientelistic linkages between politicians and interest groups in Taiwan. 10.  Poor performance by these minor parties resulted in their dissolution, for the electoral regulation required the dissolution of a political party that failed to garner 2 percent of the total national vote. 11.  The unconstitutionality of the existing electoral law lay in the national list system. According to the pre-2002 law, parties that gained the most seats from single-member district races were allotted additional seats from the national list. This meant that the votes cast for the winner in the district were translated into more than one seat for the majoritarian party and thus violated the constitutional principle of “one person, one vote.” This electoral system grossly distorted the proportionality between votes and seats. 12.  In 2003 the Korean Peasants’ League, a national umbrella organization of farmers’ associations, also declared its official affiliation with the DLP (DLP Web site, accessed on February 1, 2009). 13.  Party membership requires not only agreeing to the Party Manifesto but also regularly paying party dues. 14.  In 2006 the average household income for all Koreans was a little over US $3,000. 15.  In the CFL election to choose its chairperson, Huo Tsai-fong (the KMT-sponsored candidate) lost to Lin Huei-kwan, who eventually shifted the partisan relations from the KMT to the PFP. After her loss in the CFL election, the KMT encouraged Huo to launch a new national union, the National Association of Labor Unions, primarily based on enterprises in export-processing zones. However, this third union is as yet too weak to exercise any political relevance (Y. Chu 2001, 101). 16.  Another labor group is the Labor Rights Association (LRA), which evolved into the labor wing of the politically unsuccessful Workers’ Party (WP). The Workers’ Party was formed in 1989 after splitting from the Labor Party (LP), which was established in 1987 by Wang Yi-hsiung, a legislator of the DPP. Neither the LP nor the WP holds an

Notes to Chapters Four and Five

161

elected seat in the national legislature because of their ideological impracticality combined with high entry barriers for new parties (Copper 1993; Buchanan and Nicholls 2003). A third labor-movement group is the Workers’ Legislative Action Committee (WLAC), which was formed as a broad alliance of new independent unions demanding legal reforms. This is the only labor group with no party affiliation (Interview TA21-2). 17.  The survey was a part of my dissertation research, which was conducted in 1998 – 1999 with a total of 147 respondents who were in different social-movement groups in Taiwan. 18.  Mainlanders are the Chinese who came to the island around 1949 with the flight of the KMT. Mainlanders (waishengren, meaning people from an outside province) constitute about 14 percent of the population. Taiwanese (benshengren, meaning people from this province) constitute about 84 percent of the population. Aborigines make up the remaining 2 percent of the population (Wang 2001). 19.  This was based on an interview with 61 Taiwanese politicians (22 from the KMT, 29 from the DPP, and 10 from the NP). 20.  According to a mid-1990 figure, the KMT had 2 million card-­carrying members, roughly one-tenth of the population (Wu 1995, 89). 21.  There were two cases in which the DPP experienced a setback when it radicalized its political demands and tactics. One was the Kaohsiung Incident in 1978, which led to a massive number of arrests of opposition activists. The other was the 1991 National Assembly election, when the DPP presented a radical stance on Taiwan independence, and its vote share declined. This precipitated the rise of the election-oriented Formosa faction, which dragged the party toward a more centrist position by stressing moderate and popular policies. 22.  Two labor activists from the Taiwan Labor Front became legislators through the DPP ticket in 1996 and played an important role in writing and revising labor-related legislation. 23.  Japan also used the SNTV system until the electoral reform in 1994, and this electoral system had been criticized for encouraging factionalism and clientelism (Thies 2002). 24.  The assigned seats are reserved for overseas Taiwanese and ethnic-­minority groups. chapter five

1.  Labor reform may not be a politically neutral term. Some aspects of reform imply positive gains for labor, whereas others entail a serious setback for the same labor. The term reform is chosen here not to signify the normative direction of the change but just the change itself in the existing labor-relations institutions. 2.  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. 3.  Under the previous labor law, unions were allowed to be organized only in firms with more than thirty employees. Yet this revised clause was highly manipulative because it prevented the organization of independent and democratic unions. In fact, many companies, most notably Samsung, set up “ghost unions” with small numbers of pro-­ management workers to preempt the registration of an independent union.

162

Notes to Chapter Five

4.  The Trade Union Law was revised to allow union pluralism at the national level. Workplace-level union pluralism has been delayed to 2010. 5.  This study does not claim that wage determination can be explained solely by political conditions, as discussed in this section. Wage-bargaining outcomes are equally dependent upon market conditions (global, national, and company level). The political factors highlighted here have produced certain diverging tendencies in the mechanisms and outcomes of wage increases in Korea and Taiwan. 6.  Chuntu literally means “spring struggle.” This chuntu practice is similar to the Japanese Shunto, where labor unions concentrate their wage bargaining in the spring season. 7.  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. 8.  The average weekly working hours of twenty-three OECD countries in the period from 1981 to 1990. Italy was excluded because of discrete data. 9.  Soon after the 1989 passage of this bill, in 1990 the ruling Democratic Justice Party absorbed two opposition parties led by Kim Young Sam and Kim Jon Pil, respectively, to form a grand conservative coalition called the Democratic Liberal Party. 10.  The national crisis situation in 1997 brought together government, national unions, and employers’ organizations in Korea to discuss ways to recover from the economic disaster. In February 1998 the three parties signed a social pact for the first time in Korean history by agreeing on ninety items for structural reform. However, the pact did not work out because the KCTU and the FKTU rejected the agreement on the grounds that the government unilaterally enforced reforms in labor-market policies but not equally in corporate-governance systems — for example, chaebol restructuring (KTC 2003). 11.  The Korea Tripartite Commission’s legal status is as an advisory body to the presidential office. The commission consists of 15 –20 members who represent government, labor, business, and the public interest (usually represented by labor scholars or leaders of civic organizations), and it 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 out the KCTU leadership after their members perceived their leaders as being too compromising. 12.  The implementation of the 40-hour workweek is spread over six years: from 2004 in public enterprises and private firms with more than 1,000 employees, from 2005 in firms with between 300 and 999 employees, from 2006 in firms with between 100 and 299 employees, from 2007 in firms with between 50 and 99 employees, from 2008 in firms with between 20 and 49 employees, and from 2010 in firms with fewer than 20 employees. The initial implementation of the law affects about 8,000 firms and 1.8 million workers, less than 10 percent of the total labor force (KTC 2003). 13.  The national affiliation of Korean SOE unions is almost equally divided between the FKTU and the KCTU. 14.  Korea became the twenty-ninth member of the OECD on December 12, 1996. 15.  The ruling party passed the bill at 4 a.m. on December 26 without even notifying

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163

the members of the opposition parties about the vote in the National Assembly. It took seven minutes to pass the labor bill along with ten other bills! 16.  They include all forms of irregular labor, such as temporary, part-time, and dispatch workers. 17.  This clause stipulated that national-level union pluralism (i.e., the KCTU) would become legal in 2000, while shop-floor-level union pluralism would be granted in 2007. The latter condition has now been delayed to 2010. 18.  Many of the SOE unions used to be affiliated with the conservative FKTU and had maintained cooperative relations with management. 19.  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 because of 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). 20.  Its name has been changed to the Ministry of Strategy and Planning. 21.  Parent SOEs cut 26,651 workers, and SOE subsidiaries cut 4,460 workers. 22.  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 (Interview TB07-1). 23.  Chen had made several campaign promises: He would promote industrial democracy by expanding codetermination, eliminate the “one ­workplace one union” provision, legalize multiple unions, and reexamine the policy regarding the privatization of public enterprises (Lee 2004, 4). 24.  As mentioned in earlier chapters, the number of labor disputes in ­Korea and Taiwan cannot be directly compared because each country uses different measurements. The Korea Ministry of Labor counts labor disputes that involve a stoppage of operation at the shop floor, whereas the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs counts all levels of labor disputes. But the percentages of labor-dispute causes can be compared because they show the relative importance of certain labor issues within the same country across time. 25.  In Korean wage data, the lowest category is for firms employing 10 to 29 workers, whereas for Taiwan it is firms with fewer than 30 workers. This means that the lowest-paid workers (in firms with fewer than 10 workers) are excluded in the Korean wage data, consequently inflating the wage level of the lowest category. Thus, it is possible that the actual wage gap in Korea is more pronounced than the numbers suggest here. 26.  Both in Korea and Taiwan, a six-day workweek (working on Saturdays) was the norm during the rapidly industrializing decades. Weekends in this context meant Sundays only. By the two-day-weekend pledge, Chen meant to eventually reduce working hours to 40 hours per week. 27.  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). 28.  When Soong formed the People First Party, the CFL switched its partisan ties from the KMT to the PFP for a few years. 29.  The National Federation of Industries and the National Association of Industry and Commerce.

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30.  Similar to Korea’s MPB Task Force, this ad hoc Steering Committee is composed of nine ministers and other relevant government agencies. 31.  Already by 1994, twenty-seven SOEs had formed the Anti-Privatization ­Association. 32.  The statute was enacted in 1953 to support the land-reform program. A major revision occurred in 1991 to lay out the principles of SOE p­ rivatization.

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Chinese Federation of Labor: http://www.cfl.org.tw Democratic Labor Party: http://www.kdlp.org Federation of Korean Trade Unions: http://www.kdlp.org International Labour Organization, “LABORSTA”: http://laborsta.ilo.org Korea Confederation of Trade Unions: www.nodong.org Korea Fair Trade Commission: http://www.ftc.go.kr Korea Federation of Small and Medium Business, statistics: http://stat.kfsb.or.kr Korea Ministry of Labor, labor statistics: http://laborstat.molab.go.kr Korea National Election Commission: www.nec.go.kr Korea Statistical Information Service: www.kosis.kr National Statistics of Taiwan: www.stat.gov.tw Taiwan Central Election Commission, Election Information Databank: http://www.cec .gov.tw Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions: http://www.tctu.org.tw Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, labor statistics: http://www.cla.gov.tw Taiwan Legislative Yuan, legislators’ database: http://www.ly.gov.tw Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs: http://www.moea.gov.tw Taiwan Small and Medium Enterprise Administration: http://www.moeasmea.gov.tw World Bank, Doing Business Database: http://www.doingbusiness.org survey data

Korea Social Science Data Center: www.ksdc.re.kr (Post-Presidential Election Surveys, Post-National Assembly Election Surveys) Shin, Kwang-young, 2003 Workers Survey Data (sponsored by the Korea Academy Foundation) Taiwan Election and Democratization Study Survey (TEDS): www.tedsnet.org (PostPresidential Election Surveys, Post-Legislative Election Surveys)

Index

All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), 59 Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), 16, 19, 20, 23, 117, 119 Authoritarian control, 50 –72; comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 72; and enterprise unionism, 33; historical legacies of, 5, 10 –11, 39 – 42, 48t, 50 –52, 51t, 75, 142; independent unions created in reaction to co-opted unions under, 32, 57, 65; in Korea, 6 –7, 21, 51t, 52 –57, 71; in Taiwan, 51t, 58 – 63, 71 Automobile sector, Korean union membership from, 35, 36t Banking sector: and industrial federations, 35; Korean union membership from, 35, 36t, 37; Taiwanese union membership from, 35, 36t Case study method, use of, 9 CFL. See Chinese Federation of Labor Chaebols (Korean conglomerates), 3, 17, 19, 20, 108, 115 Chan, Lian, 132 Chemical sector, Korean union membership from, 35, 36t Cheng Tun-Jen, 60 Chen Shui-bian, 88, 98 –99, 127, 132 –33, 136

Chiang Ching-kuo, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69 Chien Hsi-chien, 98, 131 China, People’s Republic of (PRC): relocation of business and capital investment to, 23, 134; U.S. recognition of, 61 Chinese Federation of Labor (CFL, Taiwan): and anti-privatization, 134; enterprise unionism of, 36t; internal democratization of, 32; KMT linkage with, 33, 58 –59, 63, 74, 75, 88 – 89, 97; origins of, 30 –31, 59; political involvement of, 59; sectors represented by membership of, 35, 36t; in transition to democratization, 75; and workweek reduction, 132, 133 Chun Doo Hwan, 33, 54, 64 – 65, 108t Chun Tae-il (Korean garment worker), 56 Church groups, involvement in Korean labor movement, 56 CLA. See Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs Coalition for 84 Work Hours (Taiwan), 133 Collective action: Korean ban on, under Park regime, 54; and labor militancy, 25; labor politics as, 13, 25; strategies employed by labor unions, 47; and Taiwanese vs. Korean business structure, 3, 37 Collective agreements, authority to sign, 33, 37 Collective-bargaining authority: comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 37; and industrial federations, 33

178

Index

Collier, David, 40, 142 Collier, Ruth Berins, 40, 141, 142 Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, 52 Committee to Oversee SOE Privatization (Taiwan), 137 Communication industry, Taiwanese union membership from, 35, 36t Comparative case study method, use of, 9 –10 Concentration, union. See Labor unions Constitutional Court (Korea) ruling on electoral system (2000), 85 Constitutions: Korean, 106; Taiwanese, 69 Construction industry: Korean union membership from, 35; Taiwanese union membership from, 35 Council for Economic Planning and Development (Taiwan), 135 –36 Council of Grand Justices (Taiwan), 69 Cross negotiations (gyocha hyeopsang) of industrial federations, 35 Daan Byeongho, 73 Dangwai (Taiwanese non-KMT activists), 62, 67, 67f, 68, 71, 72, 89, 97, 139 Democratic Justice Party (DJP, Korea), 64, 66, 77, 80, 106 Democratic Korea Party, 64, 106 Democratic Labor Party (DLP, Korea): labor legislators from, 77; membership (2007), 86; organization and supporters of, 45, 74, 75, 86 – 87, 87t; sectoral organizations, linkage with, 86; split into Progressive New Party, 85; success after change in election laws (2000), 85; and union mobilization prospects, 88; and worker voting, 79 Democratic Liberal Party (Korea), 66, 77 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, Taiwan): defeat of KMT in elections (2000 –2007), 96; election results, 67, 67f, 71, 99 –100; ethnic identity of supporters of, 94, 94t; following example of KMT in linking to labor union, 98; ideological nature of, 146; moderation strategy employed by, 97; origins, 7– 8, 62, 68; and pro–Pan Green Camp (pro-independence of Taiwan from PRC), 94, 98t; splitting into other parties, 89, 95f, 125; TCTU linked to, 74, 75, 89 –91, 98, 106; as worker party, 46; and workweek reduction, 133 –37

Democratization, 63 –72; and independent union movement, 31–32, 57; and labor politics, 3 –9, 42 – 46, 142 – 43; labor’s engagement in, 147; transition in Korea, 11, 38, 64 – 66; transition in Taiwan, 11, 38, 61, 66 –72. See also Pro-democracy coalitions Demonstrations. See Strikes and demonstrations Density and coverage of labor unions, 20 –21, 27–30, 36t, 37 Deyo, Fred, 13 Dictatorships. See Authoritarian control DJP. See Democratic Justice Party DLP. See Democratic Labor Party DPP. See Democratic Progressive Party East Asian economic miracle, 2, 141 Economic theory of labor unions, 4, 10, 17–22, 141 Economy (1987–2007), 18, 18t, 51 Elections: absence of class voting in Korea (1992 –2004), 77–79, 78t; codetermination as presidential election issue (Taiwan 2000), 127, 132; comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 69 –71, 70t, 91; Korean election law reform, 85; and party coalitions, 41– 42; party shares in democratized Taiwan, 97, 98t; in predemocratized Taiwan, 61; single nontransferable vote (SNTV) electoral system in Taiwan, 82, 96, 99; Taiwanese election law reform, 99 –100; workers’ voting patterns in Taiwan (1992 –2004), 91, 92 – 93t; workweek reduction as presidential election issue (Taiwan 2000), 116 Electoral participation, 41– 42. See also Democratization Enterprise unionism, 26 –27, 33, 37, 54, 128 Ethnic-justice issues of Taiwanese workers, 8, 46, 60, 74, 90 –94, 92t, 94t, 142, 144 Europe: authority of labor unions in, 32; importance of historical legacies to labor studies of, 141; linkage of unions and political parties in, 43; political goals of labor unions in, 4; sectoral differences in bargaining in, 17; social-protection policies and labor unions in, 26 Exclusion as factor in labor mobilization, 41, 143; and authoritarian legacies, 5, 6 –7; and Korean authoritarian regimes, 41– 42, 52, 57; and weak linkage of Korean unions and political parties, 74, 100, 143

Index Factory Closure Law (Taiwan), 135 Factory Saemaeul (New Village) Movement (Korea), 54 “February 22 Incident” (Taiwan), 58 Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU): alternative labor movement to, 57; and anti-privatization, 120 –21, 123; authoritarian control of, 53 –54, 71, 107; enterprise unionism of, 33, 34, 36t; independence from president and government, 84; internal democratization of, 32; legislators with labor backgrounds from, 77; linkage with political parties, 73, 75; membership from key sectors, 35, 36t; origins of, 30 –31; and socialprotection programs, 115; in transition to democratization, 75; and wage increases, 111, 112; and workweek reduction, 118 Flexibility vs. rigidity of labor market, comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 139, 140t Formosa faction of DPP, 97 Frantz, Erica, 83 Gates, Hill, 60 Geddes, Barbara, 83 Germany, workdays lost due to labor disputes in, 14, 14 f Grand National Party (Korea), 77, 86, 86t, 118 Hankyoreh Party (Korea), 85 Historical institutionalism, 38, 39 Historical legacies: of authoritarian control, 5, 10 –11, 39 – 42, 48t, 50 –52, 51t, 75, 142; importance to labor studies, 38 –39, 141, 142; leading to labor militancy, 6 –7, 41 Hospital sector: and industrial federations, 35; Korean union membership from, 35, 36t Hours of work. See Workweek reduction Ho Yeng-tang, 102 Inclusion vs. exclusion: comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 73 –74; as factor in labor mobilization vs. moderation, 5, 6 –7, 41 Independent unions, 31–32; created in reaction to co-opted unions under authoritarian regimes, 32, 57, 65; lack of access to institutional politics, effect of, 47, 76; Taiwan’s independent union federations, 125 –27, 126t; view of linkage to Korean political parties as “selling out,” 84

179

Industrial sector, 17, 18, 19, 19t, 23, 35, 113 Industrial structures, comparison of, 3, 17–18 Industrial unions: compared to enterprise unions, 33; membership in Korea, 33, 35; membership in Taiwan, 28 –29, 31 Institutional participation (electoral and administrative participation), 41– 42; and political parties, 45, 83t Institutional stability, importance of, 3, 80 – 83, 83t Intellectuals’ involvement: Korean authoritarian government brutality toward, 64 – 65; in Korean labor unions, 56; protesting for Korean democratization, 51; protesting for Taiwanese democratization, 62 International Labour Organization (ILO) on number of unionized workers in Taiwan and Korea, 30 Interviews as part of research, 10, 149 –52 Japan: enterprise unionism in, 33; labor militancy in, 26 –27; large conglomerates and unions in, 17–18; political ineffectiveness of labor movement in, 26; workdays lost due to labor disputes in, 14, 14 f Job security and anti-privatization: in Korea, 104t, 119 –24; in Taiwan, 104t, 134 –38 Joint Committee Against Privatization (Korea), 123 KCIA. See Korean Central Intelligence Agency KCTU. See Korean Confederation of Trade Unions Kim Dae Jung, 66, 75, 80, 108t, 109, 117, 122 Kim Jong Pil, 80 Kim Young Sam, 66, 76, 80, 108t, 120 KMT. See Kuomintang Koo, Hagen, 53, 56 Korea: absence of class voting in (1992 – 2004), 77, 78t; in Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), 23; authoritarian control in, 6 –7, 41– 42, 51, 51t, 52 –57, 71; democratic transition in, 11, 38, 64 – 66; economic development in, 51, 51t; economy (1987–2007), 18, 18t; elections (1952 –2008), 69 –70, 70t; flexibility vs. rigidity of labor market, 139, 140t; irregular workers in labor force, 24; labor force composition (1987–2007), 18, 19t;

180

Index

labor politics in, 48t; large conglomerates and unions in, 3, 17–18; legislators’ backgrounds, 76 –77, 77t; martial law under Park, 54; political parties in, 45 – 46, 73 – 88; presidentialism in politics of, 83 – 84; regionalism as dividing electoral factor in, 76, 78 – 80, 91, 100; workdays lost due to labor disputes, 14, 14 f, 15, 16f. See also Korean labor unions; Political parties Korea Electric Power Company, 123 Korea Heavy Industry, 123 Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), 53, 54, 55, 56 Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU): and anti-privatization, 120 –21, 123; membership from key sectors, 35, 36t; origins of, 31, 57, 75, 108; and political party (DLP) linkage, 75 –76, 84, 86; political suppression of, 108; recognition of, 106, 108 –9, 138; and social-protection programs, 115; structure and authority of, 34, 36t; voting in presidential election (2000) by members, 79; and wage increases, 111, 112; and workweek reduction, 117–18 Korean labor unions: authoritarians’ control of, 52 –57, 142; density and coverage of, 28 –30, 29f, 36t, 37; independent unions’ formation, 65; job security and antiprivatization, 119 –24; labor disputes, 110, 111t; militancy of, 1, 2, 6, 13, 27, 76, 124, 139, 143; mobilization as contentious process, 47; organization of, 3 – 4; outcomes of efforts of, 11, 102, 103, 104t, 138 – 40; political ineffectiveness of, 7, 26, 45 – 46, 138; political suppression of, 107– 8, 108t; recognition of union rights, 105 –9, 106t; single unionism imposed on, 54 –55, 57, 106 –7; strikes and demonstrations by, 7, 14, 64 – 65, 76, 113, 116, 118, 121, 123; structure and authority of, 33 –37, 34 f, 36t; wage increases, 110 –16, 112f, 114 f; workweek reduction, 116 –19. See also Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU); Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU); Political party linkages with labor unions Korea Telecom Corporation, 123 Korea Tobacco and Ginseng Corporation, 123 Korea Tripartite Commission (KTC): and job security vs. privatization, 123, 124;

and workweek reduction negotiations, 117, 118 Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan: control of official unions, 33, 42, 58 – 60; election results, 67, 67f, 69, 96, 100; ethnic identity of supporters of, 94, 94t; history of, 7– 8, 21, 58, 95 –96; and job security and anti-privatization, 135; and legislative representation of labor interests, 46, 59, 74, 91; party competition with DPP, 48, 62, 94 –95, 95f, 144; and pro–Pan Blue Camp (pro-unification of Taiwan with PRC), 94 –95, 98t; splitting into other parties, 95f, 97; stability of party since democratic transition, 81– 82, 96; and transition to democratization, 66 – 68; and union organizing, 125; and workweek reduction, 133 –34 Kwangpyo Rho, 123 Kwon Young-kil, 86 Labor disputes: frequency in Korea, 110, 111t; frequency in Taiwan, 127, 128t; number of workers involved in, 14 –15, 15f, 76; workdays lost due to, 13 –14, 14 f, 15. See also Strikes and demonstrations Labor force composition (1987–2007), 18, 19, 19t Labor militancy: compared to moderation, 103; defined, 13; historical legacies leading to, 6 –7, 41; and labor politics, 3 – 4, 10, 13 –17; not indicator of labor strength, 145; number of workers involved in labor disputes, 14 –15, 15f, 76; vehemence in Korea, 1, 2, 6, 13, 27, 76, 124, 139, 143; workdays lost due to labor disputes, 13 – 14, 14 f, 15, 16f Labor mobilization. See Mobilization and gains in labor reforms Labor moderation: compared to militancy, 103; inclusion vs. exclusion as factor for, 5, 6 –7, 41; and labor politics, 3 – 4; of Taiwanese labor unions, 1, 2, 13, 97 Labor politics, 12 – 49; as collective action, 13; comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 48, 48t; as democratic project, 3 –9, 38, 142 – 43; economic structural explanation for, 4, 10, 17–22; historical legacies of authoritarian control, 39 – 42; and labor militancy, 3 – 4, 10, 13 –17; organizational basis of unions, 35 –38; organizational explanation for, 25 –38; and social divisions

Index vs. political divisions, 79, 83, 94; structural changes in labor market since Asian financial crisis, 22 –25 Labor-reform politics and union gains: comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 138 – 40, 144; in Korea, 47, 105 –24, 138; overview, 11, 47– 48, 48t, 103 –5, 104t; in Taiwan, 47, 124 –38. See also Job security and antiprivatization; Recognition of union rights; Wage increases; Workweek reduction Labor Rights Association (Taiwan), 89 Labor Standard Law (1984, Taiwan), 68, 125, 127, 131 Labor studies: economic focus of, 141; focus on linkage of unions and political parties, 43; importance of historical legacies to, 38 –39, 141, 142 Labor unions: comparison of outcomes achieved in Korea and Taiwan, 102 –5, 104t, 138 – 40; concentration of, 18, 30 – 32, 36t; density and coverage of, 20 –21, 27–30, 36t, 37; difficulty to break out of culture of militancy and radicalism, 145; evolution of, 5, 147– 48; national labor unions, 30 –32; organizational approach to behavior and performance of, 25 –38; organizational basis of, 35 –38; as political actors, 4, 42, 141; structure and authority of, 32 –35, 36t. See also Korean labor unions; Political party linkages with labor unions; Taiwanese labor unions Large company unions, 3, 17–18; comparison of Taiwan and Korea, 37–38. See also Chaebols (Korean conglomerates) Latin America: importance of historical legacies to labor studies of, 141; linkage of unions and political parties in, 43; political party instability in, 83; and transition to democratization, 40 Layoffs. See Job security and antiprivatization Lee Hoi Chang, 79 Lee Hong-jun, 50 Lee Myung Bak, 75 Lee Teng-hui, 69, 109t Legislative representation of labor interests, 46, 59, 74, 77t, 91 Linkage with political parties. See Political party linkages with labor unions Lipset, Seymour M., 6, 12 Local elections in Taiwan, 70 –71, 72, 96 –97

181

Metal sector: and industrial federations, 35; Korean union membership from, 35, 36t Methodology: case study method, use of, 9; comparative case study method, use of, 9 –10; data from union sources in addition to official sources, 36 –37; interviews as part of research, 10, 149 –52; National Legislators’ Career Background (NLCB) data, 153 –54 Mexico, labor unions’ goals vs. goals of democratization in, 4 Ministry of Economic Affairs (MEA, Taiwan), 130 –31 Ministry of Labor (Korea): Analysis of Labor Union Organizations, 35; count of labor disputes by, 14; number of non-SME workers in unions, 20; union data from, 27 Ministry of Planning Budget (MPB, Korea), 122 –23, 124 Minjung project (Korea), 56 Mobilization and gains in labor reforms, 2, 46 – 49; and enterprise unionism, 26; exclusion as factor in mobilization, 5, 6 –7, 41, 143. See also Job security and antiprivatization; Recognition of union rights; Wage increases; Workweek reduction National Center for Democratic Constitution (Gukbon) (Korea), 65 National Congress of Trade Unions ( Jeonnohyeop) (NCTU, Korea), 57, 107, 108, 109 National Council of Korean Labor Unions ( Jeonpyeong), 53 National labor unions, 30 –32 National Legislators’ Career Background (NLCB) data, 153 –54 National Statistical Office (Taiwan), lack of data on labor force composition, 24 New Democratic Republican Party (Korea), 77 New Korea Democratic Party, 64, 77, 80, 106 New Korea Party, 121 New Party (NP, Taiwan), 94, 94t New Tide Faction (Taiwan), 62, 89, 97 Occupational unions (Taiwan), 28 –29, 31, 82 Olsonian logic of interest aggregation and organizational incentives, 25 Organizational capabilities based on size and location of firms, 3, 17–22; not able to explain differences between Taiwan and Korea, 37–38

182

Index

Organizational/structural basis of labor unions, 18, 35 –38, 36t; not able to explain differences between Taiwan and Korea, 37–38 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Korean preparation for joining, 120 Park Chung Hee, 21, 33, 53 –54, 64, 108t Park Jong-cheol (Korean student activist), 65 Partisan allies, advantages of, 6, 7, 10, 43, 47– 49, 100 –101, 145. See also Political party linkages with labor unions Party for Peace and Democracy (Korea), 80 People First Party (PFP, Taiwan), 89, 91, 94, 97 Peoples’ Committees (Korea), 52 People’s Party (Korea), 85 Plant closings. See Job security and antiprivatization Pluralism. See Recognition of union rights Pohang Iron and Steel Corporation, 123 Political opposition: comparison of Korean and Taiwanese opposition to authoritarian regimes, 63; and institutional openness, 41– 42, 96 –97; and Korean authoritarian regimes, 41– 42, 57, 64 – 65, 83; and Taiwanese authoritarian regimes, 42, 62 – 63. See also Dangwai Political parties: comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 95, 97; in democratic Korea, 80 – 81, 82f, 83t; in democratic Taiwan, 83t, 94 –95, 95f; in democratized states, 5 – 6, 74 – 88; and ethnic identity in democratized Taiwan, 90 –94, 91–92t, 94t; mediating social conflict, 11; membership in Korean parties (2007), 86t; minority parties in Korean legislature, 87– 88; posttransition instability in Korea, 80 – 81, 83 – 84; post-transition stability in Taiwan, 81– 82; pro-labor candidates of, 45, 73 –74; and regionalism in democratized Korea, 76, 78 – 80, 91, 100; and single nontransferable vote (SNTV) electoral system in Taiwan, 82, 96, 99; two-party system/ camps in Taiwan, 94 –95, 95f, 101 Political party linkages with labor unions, 11, 42 – 46, 44 f, 48t, 72, 73 –101; and democratization, 74 – 88; importance in labor studies, 8, 143, 145; in Korea, 45 – 46, 48t, 72, 73 – 88, 100, 109, 124, 145 – 46; stability of political party as factor, 45,

74, 80 – 84, 83t; sustainability of partisan relations, 147; in Taiwan, 8, 46, 48t, 72, 74, 88 –101, 90f, 132, 145 – 46 Political suppression: of Korean labor unions, 107– 8, 108t; of Taiwanese labor unions, 108, 109t Politics, defined, 5 Post-communist countries’ authoritarian legacies, 40 PRC. See China, People’s Republic of Presidential Commission on Industrial Relations Reform (Korea), 120 Presidentialism: in Korea’s politics, 83 – 84; Taiwan’s ability to avoid, 97 Privatization: of SMEs and SOEs in Taiwan, 134 –38; of SOEs in Korea, 119 –24, 122t. See also Job security and anti-privatization Pro-democracy coalitions, 5, 11, 41, 42, 63 –72. See also Dangwai Progressive New Party (Korea), 85 Pro–Pan Blue Camp (pro-unification of Taiwan with PRC), 94 –95, 98t Pro–Pan Green Camp (pro-independence of Taiwan from PRC), 94 –95, 98t Protective Measures for Laid-off Workers (Taiwan), 135 Public enterprise unions (Korea), 35 Recognition of union rights: comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 104t, 105 – 6, 106t; in Korea, 105 –9; political suppression tactics, 107– 8, 108 –9t; in Taiwan, 106t, 124 –27, 126t Regional independent union federations (Taiwan), 125 –27, 126t Regionalism in democratized Korea, 76, 78 – 80, 91, 100 Reunification Democratic Party (Korea), 80 Rhee Syngman, 52 –53 Rigger, Shelley, 93 Roh Moo Hyun, 78, 79 Roh Tae Woo, 66, 76, 80, 107, 108t Samsung, 20 Schattschneider, E. E., 43 Sectoral representation in labor unions, 17, 35 –36, 36t, 37, 82, 86 Segyehwa (Korean internationalization), 120 Service sector, 17, 19, 19t, 24, 29, 35, 36t Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), effect of: comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 17–20, 20t; and Taiwanese collection-

Index action problems, 37; and Taiwanese economy, 3; and wage differentials by firm size, 115; and workweek reduction, 117, 118 Social divisions vs. political divisions, 79, 83, 94 Social-protection policies: as bond for political parties and labor unions, 146; in Korea, 115, 119 Soong, James, 97, 132 South Africa, labor unions’ goals meshing with politics in, 4 “Spring Offensive” (chuntu, Korea), 113 State-owned enterprises (SOEs): CFL membership in, 35, 36t; comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 121, 122t; ethnic segregation practices of, 60; in Taiwan, 7, 21–22, 23, 36, 130 –31; and transition to industrial unions, 35; and wage levels, 111, 130 –31. See also Privatization Steering Committee for Promoting the Privatization of SOEs, 135 Strikes and demonstrations: authority to call, 33; count of by Korean and Taiwanese labor agencies, 14, 15f; democratization, effect of, 15 –16; financial crisis or recession, effect of, 16; and job security, 121, 123; in Korea, 7, 14, 64 – 65, 76, 113, 116, 118, 121, 123; number of workers involved in labor disputes, 14 –15, 15f, 76; political and economic consequences of, 3; in Taiwan, 68, 130; and wage increases, 113, 116, 130; and workweek reduction, 118. See also Labor militancy Structure and authority of labor unions, 32 –35; comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 3 – 4, 10, 33 –35, 34 f, 36t, 37 Student involvement: Korean authoritarian government brutality toward, 64 – 65; in Korean labor unions, 56; protesting for democratization, 51, 53 Taipei County Federation of Industrial Unions (TCFI), 125, 126t Taiwan: in Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), 23; authoritarian control in, 7– 8, 42, 51, 51t, 58 – 63, 71; democratic transition in, 11, 38, 61, 66 –72; economic development in, 18, 18t, 23, 51, 51t; election law reform, 99 –100; elections (1952 –2008), 69 –70, 70t; flexibility vs. rigidity of labor market, 139, 140t; labor force composition

183

(1987–2007), 18, 19t; labor-reform politics in, 47– 48, 48t, 124 –38; legislators’ backgrounds, 77t; local elections in, 70 – 71, 72, 96 –97; martial law in, 42, 59, 61, 68; political parties’ linkage with unions in, 46, 88 –101; recognition of union rights in, 124 –27; two-party system/camps in, 94 –95, 95f, 101; U.S. de-recognition of, 61, 64; workdays lost due to labor disputes, 14, 14 f, 15, 16f. See also Taiwanese labor unions Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU): and anti-privatization, 134; DPP relationship with, 74, 75, 89 –91, 97–99; origins of, 31, 63, 90, 126, 139; recognition of, 106, 127; sectors represented by membership of, 35, 36t; structure and authority of, 36t; and workweek reduction, 132, 133 Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs (CLA): count of labor disputes by, 14; establishment of, 68; labor policies, enactment of, 126; on regional federations’ formation, 125; union data from, 27; union-density data from, 21 Taiwanese labor unions: collective action problems of, 3; concentration on partisan linkages rather than workplace activism, 99, 100 –101; density and coverage of, 28 – 30, 29f, 36t, 37; industrial vs. occupational unions, 28 –29; and job security and antiprivatization, 121, 122t, 134 –38; linkages with political parties, 46, 48t, 72, 88 –101, 90f, 147; moderate characterization of, 1, 2, 13, 97; number of, 68; organizing of non-union workers, 68; outcomes of efforts of, 11, 102, 104t, 105, 138 – 40; recognition of union rights, 106t, 124 –27, 126t; structure and authority of, 33 –37, 34 f, 36t; transition to industrial unions, 35; and wage increases, 112f, 127–31, 129f; and workweek reduction, 131–34. See also Chinese Federation of Labor (CFL); Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU) Taiwan Independence Party, 94 Taiwan Labor Front (TLF), 62 – 63, 89 Taiwan Solidarity Union, 94 Task Force for SOE Privatization (Korea), 122 –23 TCFI (Taipei County Federation of Industrial Unions), 125, 126t

184

Index

TCTU. See Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions Teacher unions, Korean union membership, 35, 36t Textile sector, Korean union membership from, 35, 36t Third-wave democratization: and authoritarian legacies, 40; and workers’ protests, 4 TLF. See Taiwan Labor Front Tong-tu (unification with or independence from mainland China), 94 Trade Union Act (Korea), 55, 108 Trade Union Law of 1929 (Taiwan), 22, 61, 125, 127 Transportation sector: Korean unions, 35, 36t, 113; Taiwanese unions, 35, 36, 36t Unions. See Korean labor unions; Labor unions; Taiwanese labor unions; specific union by name United Democratic Party (Korea), 86, 86t United States: de-recognition of Taiwan by, 61, 64; workdays lost due to labor disputes in, 14, 14 f Urban Industrial Mission (Korea), 56

Valenzuela, J. Samuel, 35 Wage increases: authority to bargain for, 33; comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 111–12, 112f, 129, 144; differentials by firm size in Korea, 113 –14, 114 f, 115; differentials by firm size in Taiwan, 128 –29, 129f; in Korea, 102, 104t, 110 –16, 111t; in Taiwan, 104t, 127–31, 129f Walkouts. See Strikes and demonstrations White-collar unions in Korea, 36, 66, 87 Women workers, 24 Workdays lost due to labor disputes, 13 –14, 14 f, 15, 16f Workers’ Great Struggle (Korea), 65 Workers’ Party (Taiwan), 89 Work stoppage. See Strikes and demonstrations Workweek reduction: comparison of Korea and Taiwan, 116, 119; in Korea, 104t, 116 –19; in Taiwan, 104t, 131–34 Xiezhuhui (Taiwanese work councils), 130 Yang, David D., 91 Young Catholic Workers (Korea), 56 Yushin regime (Korea), 54, 64