Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: 行政院新聞局/Public Domain
A SECOND-INSTANCE JUDGMENT by the Taiwan High Court has ruled that the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) must pay 170 million NT to affected former employees and their family members. In the judgment, there were a total of 222 plaintiffs.
The RCA case is one of Taiwan’s most historically well-known labor disputes, as one of the longest legal battles between a company and former employees in Taiwanese history. RCA, an American company, set up a factory in Taoyuan in 1969 in order to manufacture electronic products such as television components and motherboards, taking advantage of lax safety regulations and cheap labor costs in Taiwan. However, chemical pollutants from the plant were discharged into the air, water supply, and soil around the factory, and the health of workers was affected by chemicals from the factory. Depending on how one counts diseases, workers suffer from 31 to 38 diseases.
Indeed, RCA employed thousands of workers in Taiwan between 1970 and 1992, through a Taiwanese subsidiary of the American company, the Radio Corporation of America. However, industrial pollution from the RCA plant in Taoyuan led to 78 deaths caused by the pollution, and 237 of the 529 workers involved in the case developed cancer or related illnesses. In part, the reason as to why the case would become so well known is because it involves an American company whose actions permanently damaged the health of Taiwanese workers. Based on environmental assessments previously conducted by RCA, many believe that RCA was aware of the pollution but did nothing about it.
RCA is accused of having been aware of the effects of pollution from environmental assessments conducted during the 1980s, with workers recalling behavior from managers that suggests that they were aware of environmental pollution from the plant. Likewise, RCA is accused of transferring assets out of Taiwan into overseas bank accounts, using shell companies, hiding information, or even feigning ignorance of the lawsuit to try and avoid penalties.
RCA workers in a historical photo. Photo credit: 行政院新聞局/Public Domain
In the course of the decades-long case, ownership of RCA was acquired by General Electric and then later by Thomson Consumer Electronics, the American branch of the French company Technicolor SA. Lawyers working on the case pro bono, including members of the Judicial Reform Foundation and Legal Aid Foundation, together with RCA workers that organized through the RCA Worker Self-Help Association, have also generally been outgunned by RCA, a large multinational corporation that can afford expert witnesses and international legal experts.
RCA employed around twenty thousand factory workers in Taiwan. The number of workers affected by the case is large enough that this has required two successive class action lawsuits. The class is a landmark one in the history of both Taiwanese labor and Taiwanese jurisprudence, seeing as there are few precedents for class action lawsuits involving hundreds of plaintiffs. The decision was made to pursue a class-action lawsuit in which workers would divide the settlement among themselves rather than individual settlements due to the large number of plaintiffs. Historically speaking, the case could very well have been Taiwan’s first class-action lawsuit. The first class-action lawsuit began in 2005, involving 508 workers, and the second began in 2015, involving 1,120 workers.
More generally, RCA has been accused of transferring assets out of Taiwan through shell companies, and it has proved difficult for lawyers to navigate through the complex web of shell companies used by RCA. The decision was made by lawyers to not only target RCA Taiwan due to its possible inability to pay, with then-owner General Electric also added to the list of responsible entities. RCA sometimes feigned ignorance or did not make court appearances. Insurance records show that RCA spent 210 million NT fighting the case, however.
The ruling by the High Court follows a Constitutional Court ruling in 2022 that ordered the High Court to make another ruling on the case. At the same time, it is possible to appeal, and it is likely that RCA will do so.
Though the plaintiffs and their lawyers have expressed gratitude for the ruling, the compensation is lower than they hoped for, as a result of which they have stated that the ruling is hard to accept. In this sense, it is probable that one of Taiwan’s longest-running legal battles is not over yet.