Rights abuses of migrant fishermen are in the news again in Taiwan, particularly on the heels of a report last month by Greenpeace East Asia condemning treatment of migrant fishermen, and rallies by a coalition of NGOs calling themselves “Human Rights for Migrant Fishers.” However, while the issue is a known one and migrant workers’ groups have allied themselves with Taiwanese labor groups, it remains to be seen how to make the issue resonate in wider Taiwanese society...
Healthcare workers are on the protest in Taiwan, as observed in recent demonstrations outside the Ministry of Health and Welfare on May 6th by the Taiwan Radical Nurses’ Union calling for better workplace protections for nurses...
The annual demonstration commemorating International Workers’ Day took place today in Taipei, drawing thousands of workers out onto the streets in protest...
Looking back on recent demonstrations against the Tsai administration’s planned changes to the Labor Standards Act, it may do well to review some of the reasons as to why protests did not spark anything on the scale of the Sunflower Movement, and why these demonstrations were, in that way, ultimately unsuccessful. Namely, these demonstrations in many ways replicated the dynamics of the Sunflower Movement, just less successfully. Perhaps this ultimately returns to structural shifts in Taiwanese society since 2014...
An ongoing sit-in by EVA flight attendants, with several hundred EVA workers congregating outside EVA headquarters, continues the unionization drive in Taiwan’s airline industry most dramatically expressed in in the 2016 China Airlines strike, led by the Taoyuan Flight Attendant’s Union. EVA was one of the airlines which sought to unionize in the aftermath of the strike, despite that EVA has historically forbidden labor unions. The sit-in began on January 21st and has lasted for over 72 hours at this point...
The first labor strike since the passage of changes to the Labor Standards Act by the Tsai administration has broken out, with workers at the Miramar Golf and Country Club in Linkou going on strike against their employers...
Outrage against the Tsai administration’s changes to the Labor Standards Act is notably on the uptick since they passed, despite the fact that these changes have not yet taken effect...
Although it may have failed in preventing the changes from passing in the end, demonstrations against the Tsai administration's changes to the Labor Standards Act developed a unique visual language. Namely, in the past few years, a sign of the “maturity” of any social movement in Taiwan is that movement developing a unique visual language of its own. We might examine the characteristics of protest art during demonstrations against the Labor Standards Act, then...
