Biggest Ever Workers' Demonstration
in Taiwan

Mayday 1998

By Jonathan Cohen

With as many as 25,000 workers on the streets, this year's Mayday march in Taiwan was the biggest workers' demonstration the island has ever seen. After decades in which all independent workers' organisations were wiped out and replaced by tame unions under the control of the ruling KMT (Nationalist Party,) this march showed that the workers' movement here is being reborn. A new General Federation of Manufacturing Unions is being formed by the still theoretically illegal autonomous unions under the guidance of the three main socialist or social-democratic-oriented political groupings, the Taiwan Labour Front, the Committee for Workers' Legislation and the Labour Rights Association.

The majority of the participants in the Mayday march were workers from state-run enterprises which are slated for privatisation, such as the petroleum, power generation and telecom industries. Employees of Chunghwa Telecom made up by far the largest contingent. In addition, smaller contingents were seen from, for example, students protesting against fee hikes and former licensed prostitutes whose trade was suddenly banned by the Taipei city government last year. Some aboriginal workers (members of those ethnic groups who were in Taiwan before the arrival of the majority Hans from mainland China,) together with supporters from the Labour Party and Labour Rights Association, formed a contingent to protest against the exclusion of part-time and temporary workers from the provisions of new unemployment insurance laws. Aboriginal workers are often employed in such casual jobs.

The march also witnessed for the first time a significant attendance by migrant workers, in this case a group of Filipinos mobilised by a church-related welfare organisation based in Chungli. On the downside, it must be said that chauvinist ideas on the migrant labour issue are quite widespread among Taiwan workers. The bourgeois media have been spreading the idea that unemployment in Taiwan, and especially among Aborigines, is somehow a consequence of the presence of foreign workers. (At the same time, these very newspapers will, on another or even the same page, publish articles claiming that Taiwan suffers from a severe labour shortage which is to be alleviated by bringing in workers from Nicaragua!) With the honorable exception of the Labour Party and Labour Rights Association, Taiwan's labour organisation have not only failed to challenge these ideas but have even themselves raised such demands as "oppose importing foreign labor and mainland (Chinese) labour." The Taiwanese unions appear not to have even thought about bringing migrant labourers into their ranks, which explains why it has been left to church groups to mobilise them. But the church groups only have influence among the Filipinos, while other migrant workers such as the Thais and Indonesians remain completely uninvolved. Taiwan has remained relatively unscathed by the Asian economic crisis so far, but if this changes, the migrant workers will soon be threatened with layoffs and deportation (as has happened in Thailand and Malaysia.) Unless the Taiwan labour movement grasps the importance of integrating and mobilising migrant workers, this will be an Achilles tendon allowing the bosses and the state to attack the interests of the working class as a whole.

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Labor and Progressive Organizations in Taiwan (DOS text)
The Labor Party (Taiwan)
Labor Rights Association
Taiwan Labor Front

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