Strategies and Challenges for the Youth Labour Movement: The Experience of ‘Youth Labor Union 95’ in Taiwan

Issue No : 76  July - September 2010

By Por-Yee Lin

The ‘labour movement’ may be something unfamiliar or weird for the majority of Taiwanese people in their everyday life, especially for the young people. If we would like to have a ‘youth labour movement’, what is to be done?

There are historical factors affecting the condition of the youth labour movement. The Kuomintang government in Taiwan had suppressed the left-wing activists and any labour movements for a long period, from 1945 to the end of the 1980s. As a result, the independent labour movement in Taiwan lacks a strong historical tradition and only emerged after the 1980s. Moreover, the experience of economic development confused the workers. As one sociologist Gwo-Shyong Shieh has called it, Taiwan was a ‘boss island’, which means there were many newly established small employers during the 1960s to 1980s, and the phenomenon caused many workers to falsely believe they could solve their oppression just by becoming bosses themselves. As a result, the labour movement faced much more difficulties in Taiwan.

However, the young generation in Taiwan may be facing a much harder challenge. On the one hand, the real wage has ceased to progress since 1994. On the other hand, as the expansion of higher education has produced many more students than before, more young people have to pay the costs for entering higher education (including tuition fees, debts and living expenditures), but the real wages for university students are decreasing, apart from the effect of ‘credential inflation’— i.e., the effect of the rising supply of graduates decreasing the rewards of having a university degree. As a result, there are more students who need part-time jobs to meet the demand of capitalists for their survival. But part-time jobs are often seen as ‘not a job’, and are taken as a learning opportunity or even as a leisure activity, not taken seriously by civil society as needing protection.

Under the effects of the crisis of jobs and ideologies, the part-time workers and other ‘irregular workers’ (e.g.: internships, student-workers, outsourced workers, etc.) usually face worse working conditions, yet have no power or willingness to fight against employers to improve them.

Youth Labor Union 95 and part-time workers rally to demand a raise of the minimum wage and change in calculation of part-time workers’ holiday pay, June 2007. Photo: Youth Labor Union 95

In order to transform these conditions, our challenges and questions are: how can we improve the working conditions and labour consciousness of young people? By what means can we increase the number of young people who join the labour movement, or at least fight for their rights? Moreover, as we are almost all still student activists with only limited financial resources, what can we do to pursue our goals?

Strategies for connection with young workers

‘Youth Labor Union 95’ initiated in 2005, is an independent organization aimed at promoting the youth labour movement in Taiwan. Our members consist of young social activists, graduate students and undergraduate students. We identify ourselves both as a labour NGO (a non-government organization committed to improving the working conditions of young people) and as a union (for young workers to join in us for solidarity and collective bargaining).

In the initial period, we faced many challenges in connecting with young workers. In 2005-2006, we held four small conferences to discuss the ‘youth poverty’ issues, including the degradation of labour rights, hike in tuition fees, lowering of the birth rate, and the financial credit crisis. These conferences provoked good discussions, but the participants were almost all research students or social activists, not ‘ordinary’ workers or students. How could we connect with young workers even further? 

(1) Online appeal and hotline for young workers

In June 2007, the government raised the minimum wage 9.09% in the last 10 years; and under the impact of our protest (see the photo at left facing page), the government also changed the calculation method of the minimum wage of part-time workers to include the holiday payment for them (See Table 1 below). As a result, the minimum wage for part-time workers was changed dramatically from NT$66 (approximate US$2.10) per hour to NT$95 (approximate US$3) per hour.

To achieve the minimum wage, in July 2007, we set up an ‘online appeal’ zone on our website, for workers to seek our help for their legal labour rights. At the same time, we released an ‘appeal hotline number’ (the cell phone number of one of our core members) through the newspaper.

Table 1. The Changes in Minimum Wage and Calculation Method from July 2007

(Exchange rate: US$1 = approx. NT$31)

Surprisingly, this way broke the obstacles of the past in connecting with young workers, and we received more than three phone calls and emails from different young workers every day to get help in claiming their labour rights. In the beginning, most cases were about their wages under the new rule of the minimum wage. After 2009, there have been more different kinds of labour issues that they call us about, but most of them have been about individual labour rights, not issues of collective action (e.g., calls for help to unionize them, or to initiate collective bargaining with their employer).

What could we do to help them? When we receive the calls, after discussion with the workers, usually we call their employers directly, and tell them it’s illegal to pay their part-time workers under the minimum wage. On average half of the cases get resolved, but others do not. In the latter cases, we have to exert further pressure. For us, one way is to ask the government to intervene, and the other way is to raise public pressure.

(2) Media as the tools for raising public pressure

Generally, we try to assess the possibility of calling the press to publicize the cases when we help the workers.

Although as a small union (or a labour NGO), we cannot monopolize labour’s power collectively to bargain with the employers, we can still bargain with these employers by raising public pressure and criticism, especially when the company cares about its public image. Overall, the companies of the service sector care more keenly about their image. In our experience, two-thirds of the companies of the service sector are willing to negotiate with us after the media has covered the labour problems they have, especially if their behaviors are seen as illegal.

The effect of (2) - media strategy - is intertwined with (1) - the online appeal strategy. We found that every time we made a labour case public through the media, afterwards, there would be more young workers who try to connect with us, as a result of realizing that their labour rights may have been violated. The media coverage of these labour issues has the influence on other workers to take actions collectively, in a ‘snowballing’ effect.

Press conference of young workers to protest illegal work termination penalty deduction by a Singaporean human resources company, 3 October 2009. Photo: Youth Labor Union 95

(3) To recruit young volunteers to help these young workers 

The upsurging need to help workers with their appeals forced us to enlarge and stabilize our organization, from a temporary student alliance to at least an official NGO or a small union.

To regenerate our membership, we hold a camp annually to recruit volunteers for us to help these young workers. We found that our volunteers are almost all students from universities, and some have had experience in student movements. Until now, the majority of the core executive members of Youth Labor Union 95 have been research students of the social sciences and have been living in the capital city of Taiwan, although this phenomenon may lead to some limitations: for example, we are often not familiar with the real everyday life of ‘ordinary’ part-time or full-time workers.

The general illegal behaviors of Taiwanese employers

In 2009, Youth Labor Union 95 received 110 official appeal cases (involving 150 persons) that called for help by email, and answered more than 300 phone calls for legal advice. The numbers of the male and the female callers are almost the same. We found that there are some common illegal behaviors of employers against workers, especially against part-time workers.

According to the data from these cases, we concluded the ‘Top 5 illegal behaviors of Taiwanese employers against part-time workers (2009)’ were: violating the rule of minimum wage, lack of overtime payment, not providing legal labour insurance, lack of extra payment for work on national holidays, and charging workers an illegal penalty for pre-mature termination (See Table 2). Generally, there are fewer employers who obey the law than those who violate the law in Taiwan. Take the legal labour insurance, for example: we estimated that 77.2% of employers who hired part-time workers in Taiwan have not provided labour insurance and pensions for their part-time workers, even though this is illegal. As a result, if these workers suffer any accidents while working, they can not gain any financial or medical compensation from the government. In many cases, they even get fired.

Besides, some new illegal problems have been emerging after the economic crisis in 2008. More and more

employers have been trying to charge their workers penalties for pre-mature termination of working. For example, many nurses inTaiwan are now asked to pay a penalty of as much as three months of their wages if they terminate work before having worked for one year, although according to the labour law it is illegal if they have not received the same value of professional training as of the penalty from their employers. The illegal penalty charge happened to many service workers from 2008 as a new method to cover the deficit of some companies (see the photo on the left facing page). We have even met some workers who earned less wages than the penalties incurred – and ended up owing the employer.

A Case: The Campaign for 85°C workers’ labour rights

I will use a case to try to exemplify our work. From 2003, a Taiwanese local cafe shop – 85°C Bakery Café (or 85°C) – emerged and expanded their chain stores rapidly. The company of 85°C now has more than 300 stores in Taiwan, and is the biggest café chain in Taiwan (with more stores than Starbucks); it now has 139 stores in China as well. They announced they will expand at the speed of 100 stores per year in the world. So many management magazines took the company as the best case for commercial development.

False queue’ boycott outside a store of the leading cafe  chain 85°C - a popular form of protest among the young  workers. The words on the T-shirt of the protester says  ‘85°C Café is so bad’ – a sticker that the Youth Union  made for every protester to wear.         Photo: Youth Labor Union 95

However, after we set up the ‘online appeal’ zone, we suddenly found ourselves receiving so many cases from the workers of 85°C. In only one year from July 2007, we received 39 cases about 85°C. According to our estimation, in February 2008, more than half of the 85°C stories in Taiwan still hadn’t paid their workers the minimum wage. Almost all the part-time workers in 85°C got no labour insurance or overtime payment. The illegal behavior of 85°C violated the rights of more than 10,000 young workers per year.

It is obvious that the numbers of the rapid expansion and profits of 85°C are at the expense of the exploitation of young workers.

To help the workers in 85°C collectively, we initiated a public campaign against 85°C from May 2008. One of our main goals was to ask the company to pay and compensate for the underpaid minimum wage for all their workers. Even if the store is a ‘franchised store’, not ‘direct-owned’ by 85°C, the head company still should guarantee the legal labour rights for all the workers in their franchised stores. 

In practice, the campaign on the one hand mobilized more workers in 85°C to appeal to us or to their employers for their labour rights. On the other hand, we kept protesting against the company publicly and raised public pressure on it through media.

First of all, via phone calls, we pretended to be job seekers to ask the wages of workers in different stores of 85°C, and recorded them. After that, we held a press conference to criticize the general exploitation happening in every 85°C. We also protested publicly against the company several times. One time we even mobilized some friends to line up outside the store without buying anything, to boycott the store (see the photo on p. 27). We found that young people like this activity very much.

After public protests more than five times, and more and more workers appealing to us or the head company, at the end of 2008 we successfully forced the company to pay the minimum wage for their workers, at least in their ‘direct-owned stores’. Some of their ‘franchised stores’ still didn’t pay the minimum wage, but these cases were fewer than those in the past. By our estimate, the campaign influenced the wage conditions in more than 200 stores of 85°C. Moreover, the campaign indirectly reminded many workers in Taiwan that if their wage is under NT$95 (approximately US$3) per hour, it is illegal.

The challenges to fighting further

However, there are at least three hard challenges we encountered in this campaign. In my opinion, it also reflects the general challenges for our strategies in working with youth labourers.

Firstly, although we helped so many workers in 85°C or in other companies, we could not ‘organize’ most of them to join in our membership or labour movement, apart from conducting the campaign mainly by raising public pressure.

Considering that our financial and human resources are very limited, in our plan we hadn’t actually taken membership as the priority in this campaign; instead, we took raising deeper labour consciousness for many young workers as the priority. Nevertheless, we still face this challenge: by our activity we may be enlarging the discontent of exploited young workers, but how can we keep connecting with them to fight further, if we don’t ‘organize’ them? However, we were not optimistic about the opportunity to do so by using the organizing mode of traditional trade unions to organize part-time workers due to their mobility and job uncertainties. We still had to find out the appropriate mode to ‘organize’ them.

Secondly, we have not forced this company to obey other legal labour rights successfully, e.g.: the labour insurance, overtime payments, redundancy payments, etc. for their workers. It’s usual that a labour right will be neglected for part-time workers if it’s not connected with the wage directly, although it may be important. Sometimes some labour rights (e.g.: the extra payment for part-time workers working on national holidays) are a little complex, and the media would not be willing to transmit them fully; yet it is a limit of our strategies that they highly depend on media, and these issues get neglected easily. We have to take more effort to promote these rights by ourselves.

Thirdly, the issues we have focused on are mostly based on the law; they will be given the name of ‘legal rights’. However, there are mechanisms and sources of oppressions behind the violation of labour rights, and if only we could terminate these basic forms of oppression, the problems would not be reproduced in the workplaces. For example, it is hard to educate the young workers via online appeals or news media to realize the fundamental inequalities between labourers and capitalists in a capitalist society; but if we don’t face up to the necessity to fight against it collectively, there may be endless violations of labour rights.

Above all, we have to discover the bridge from exerting public pressure to worker organizing, from basic rights to complex rights, and from the protection of labour rights to the struggle against the logics of capitalism, collectively. These are the challenges we should face up to further.

The blog of Youth Labor Union 95 (in Chinese) can be found at: http://blog.roodo.com/youthlabor95