Synopses & Reviews
Ming-sho Ho applies Marxist theoretical perspective to understand the postwar trajectory of Taiwan's state-sector workers. A global and comparative framework is used to examine the particularity of Taiwan's working class. It revises the stereotypical image of labor docility by showing ethnicity, party-state, and internal labor market produces intra-class divides and generates a variety of workers' resistance even under the repressive rule of one-party authoritarianism. The book looks at the rise of independent labor movement in the wake of political liberalization in the late 1980s. The similar current of social movement unionism of South Africa, South Korea and Brazil is also present in this oft-neglected case. Ho observes how labor activism gradually resides as democracy is consolidated and neo-liberalism becomes the new ideological hegemony.
Synopsis
This book offers a fresh look at Taiwan's state workers in from the postwar period to the present day and examines the rise and fall of labor insurgency in the past two decades. Challenging the conventional image of docile working class, it unearths a series of workers resistance, hidden and public, in a high authoritarian era.
About the Author
Ming-sho Ho is Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University, Taiwan.
Table of Contents
1. A Historical Institutionalist Approach to Working-Class Formation
2. Researching Taiwan's Industrial Workers
3. Politics of Ethnicity: Neo-colonialism and Revolutionary Insurgency
4. Politics of Partisanship: Party-State Mobilization and Ritualism
5. Politics of Position: The Perverse Effect of Internal Labor Market Reform
6. Moonlighting and Petty Bargaining
7. From Social Movement Unionism to Economic Unionism
8. Rethinking Institution, Solidarity, and Resistance