The Taiwan Railways Union went on a 100-hour hunger strike that began at Taipei Main Station over the last weekend. This was in protest of a ruling by the Supreme Administrative Court, which found workers as having acted in bad faith through a labor protest that took the form of 337 union members taking leave over the Lunar New Year from January 27 to January 30, 2017, and only informing the company of their planned leave on January 23rd. The ruling also decided that the Taiwan Railways Administration had not engaged in unfair labor practices and was not in the wrong in marking workers who took leave as absent without authorization...
Filipino migrant workers at the TaiDoc Technology Corporation are demonstrating against union-busting and infringements of the basic rights of migrant workers at the company. TaiDoc is a major medical parts manufacturer based in New Taipei, while migrant workers are organized through the TaiDoc Technology Labor Union ...
Thousands of strangers island-wide worked together with remarkable efficiency so that the Great Recall Movement would succeed. Despite its failure to recall any of the targeted politicians from office, the Great Recall Movement holds lessons for how to rapidly mobilize civil society in response to impending threats to Taiwan’s democracy...
In July of this year, an exhibition in the Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC) was censored at the behest of Chinese authorities. The exhibition was titled "Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity" and focused on authoritarian governments. The BACC is among Thailand’s leading contemporary art centers...
As governments across East and Southeast Asia tighten restrictions on activism and association, civic space is rapidly shrinking. Leah Lin, founder of the Asia Citizen Future Association, explains how Taiwan’s democracy faces its own contradictions and why slowing the decline of freedoms may be the most radical act left...
