The Reconstructing of Industrial Relations in Taiwan’s High Technology Industries

Abstract

Scholars have shown interest in labour capacity when discussing labour movements in Taiwan’s industrial relations since the nation’s democratic transition from 1987. Interestingly, the upturn in workers’ struggles skipped the Hsinchu Science Industrial Park, which concentrated its business on the non-unionised, high-technology sector. Existing studies have not sufficiently explained how the Hsinchu Science Industrial Park escaped the series of labour conflicts after 1987. Rather than focusing on labour capacity, this article employs an alternative perspective – the role of employers and management strategies – to examine how employers brought together segments of capital and labour through a diversity of human resource management strategies. These management strategies have two aspects. First, high-tech industrial managers took advantage of “Taiwan-style” employee profit sharing and stock ownership to strengthen firms’ top tier of strategic decision-making with the support of national institutions. Second, while human resource management strategies will often differ from country to country, Taiwan’s management strategies draw from the experiences of Silicon Valley. Rather than fragmenting workers into teams and ethnic networks as in Silicon Valley, Taiwan’s managers established individual labour and management relations to avoid collective labour conflict.

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