Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Lexcie/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
WORKERS AT THE Taiwan Railways Corporation threatened to strike in response to plans by the company to issue bonuses in the form of vouchers over the Mid-Autumn Festival earlier this month. The company previously claimed that it would issue cash bonuses for workers who worked over the Mid-Autumn Festival. Although no strike happened, in the end, the incident is worth noting.
Namely, the incident continues the pattern of railway workers threatening to strike over major holidays. To this extent, the issue of bonuses has frequently been disputed between companies and workers, whether in the railways industry or elsewhere.
Namely, this returns to the practice of gifting year-end bonuses over the Lunar New Year. This can often amount to a month’s worth of pay or more. As this is a substantial chunk of workers’ salaries, such amounts are often negotiated to some extent ahead of time, but workers have sometimes reacted when this is used as a de facto means of cutting salaries.
It has been less common to hear of companies seeking to avoid compensating workers by using vouchers rather than actual pay. It is to be seen if the TRC’s actions set a precedent, particularly in the transportation industry.
The corporatization of the TRA, changing it from an agency of government into a state-owned enterprise in the form of the TRC, took place earlier this year. This occurred at the end of a yearslong struggle by TRA workers against corporatization, which was often framed as a de facto form of privatization. That the corporatization occurred in spite of many years of struggle reflects the weakness of Taiwanese labor, in many ways.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications justified the transition on the auspices of safety. This cited the deadly 2021 rail crash that involved a Taroko express train crashing into a truck that slid into the path of a tunnel. 49 were killed and 213 injured in what was Taiwan’s deadliest rail crash in history, surpassed only by a 1948 fire. It was later found that the contractor had won the tender for the construction despite a repeated history of violations and was working despite that there should have been no work going on that day, seeing as it was a public holiday that would see increased rail traffic.
Photo credit: Lexcie/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
Concerns from workers were, however, that this would worsen conditions for them in that they would lose the benefits they enjoy as public servants. Workers suggested that poorer working conditions would add to rather than alleviate safety concerns.Oftentimes, workers would point to a decline in the number of TRA workers despite increasing riders as worsening such dangers. The TRA cut workers by close to half from 22,500 to 12,500 between the 1970s and 2000s, even as the number of riders increased for the Taiwan Railways as a whole.
A significant concern for the government in pushing for corporatization was likely TRA’s lack of profitability and growing debt, seeing as this amounts to more than 170 billion NT. The government currently claims that the TRA will be profitable by 2026, though workers have expressed hesitation about such plans, citing that the TRA made more money from other revenue sources.
Either way, even if not run as a state-owned enterprise of government agency, companies in the transportation industry often have substantial ties to the state. The government is a shareholder in many transportation companies.
Other actions by the TRC administration that have outraged workers lately include a 40% increase in salary for the chair and general manager of TRC. This means that the chair of the TRC will make 191,380 NT per month and the general manager will make 187,130 NT per month. Unsurprisingly, increasing salaries for executives while cutting benefits for employees has outraged workers, as have measures as attempting to avoid paying workers cash but instead in the form of vouchers.
It may be that the TRC will decide on a strike sometime in the future, with tensions between management and workers growing, even if there was no strike over the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday. This occurs even if it may not yet be clear as to what the exact trigger of a strike could potentially be.