Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: 林高志/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
UNION GROUPS HAVE called for civil servants to be allowed to have International Workers’ Day, which is commemorated on May 1st and known as May Day in other parts of the world, off as a holiday.
Union groups such as the National Federation of Teachers’ Unions have led this charge. This proves a cause that has received bipartisan support, with DPP, KMT, and TPP legislators supportive of the move. Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han, a left-wing environmental activist close to organized labor before becoming a DPP legislator and later Minister of Labor, has also expressed support for the move.
International Workers’ Day is not a national holiday in Taiwan, but union groups have called for it to be made one. More broadly, the issue of national holidays has been contentious as a labor issue in the past decade.
In 2016, during its first year in office, the Tsai administration cut seven public holidays and undid more than 30 years of labor reforms. This was initially seen as indicating an anti-labor and pro-business orientation by the Tsai administration, which flip-flopped between acquiescing to demands by labor groups and big business multiple times.
Demonstrations against the Tsai administration’s cuts to public holidays were then the most intense series of protests Taiwan had seen since the Sunflower Movement. Among those to participate in the demonstrations were Third Force parties that formed after the movement, such as the New Power Party, as well as individuals who later became DPP politicians. The issue has long been a sticking point for organized labor in the last decade.
The issue of labor rights for public servants has received greater scrutiny in the past months after the suicide of a public servant working in the Ministry of Labor. The controversy grew large enough that it led to the resignation of then-Minister of Labor Ho Pei-shan, who was perceived as defending northern regional office of the Work Development Agency head Hsieh Yi-jung. It is unclear as to why Ho initially seemed to defend Hsieh and was reluctant to dismiss her, but speculation in the media revolved around Hsieh being well-connected politically.
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Issues of workplace bullying also were linked to overwork. The individual who committed suicide, a 39-year-old office worker surnamed Wu was found dead in the Executive Yuan’s Xinzhuang Joint Office Tower. Wu was solely responsible for creating an employment services system and was the only worker in the office who performed employment information services. In this sense, Wu’s suicide returned to issue regarding not only workplace bullying, but overwork.
Still, the call for civil servants to be allowed to take International Workers’ Day as a holiday, reiterating that they are workers, goes back to broader issues about the classification of public sector workers as teachers, civil servants, police, firefighters, and members of the army. Some of these groups are not allowed to unionize and do not have the same holiday as private sector workers, seeing as they work in the public sector.
However, in past years, there have been more calls for public sector worker groups, such as firefighters, to be allowed to unionize. Calls to allow firefighters have taken place in the context of tragedies such as the September 2023 death of four firefighters in a blaze in Pingtung, with the argument being that if firefighters are allowed to form unions, this will allow them to better advocate for safer working conditions for themselves.
This is not unlike how Wu’s suicide last year set into motion a series of calls for improved labor conditions for public servants. Indeed, after Wu’s suicide, a number of cases of workplace bullying among civil servants were reported on, with opposition politicians highlighting such cases as a means of criticizing the DPP. Yet it is still to be seen whether this wave of outrage leads to systemic changes in work culture in Taiwan–which is not confined to merely public servants–or structural shifts such as allowing public servants to unionize.