Politics of protective labor policy-making: A case study of the Labor Standards Law in Taiwan

This dissertation explores first the characteristics of labor regime and labor policies in Taiwan, and then the politics of the Labor Standards Law (LSL) making prior and during Taiwan's political and economic transition.; In the first part of this study, I challenge the popular assumption of the effectiveness of labor control system in Taiwan both at the state and enterprise level by investigating workers' perspectives on trade unions, labor policies and employment practices. This study also finds that the authoritarian developmental Taiwan regime implements restrictive procedural labor laws to prevent the possible mobilization of labor movement by political opposition, but adopts beneficent protective labor policy to preserve productive labor force for economic development and policy legitimacy.; As to the politics of the LSL making, I argue that economic development, political legitimacy, electoral competition, policy implementation outcomes, and state and society relations fundamentally influence state activity and therefore policy development. First, consideration of economic development has been very important for labor policy making. However, political legitimacy crises and electoral competition often outweigh economic considerations in determining the timing of labor policy making. Second, the state itself is not a unitary actor, within which, internal conflicts exist among state agencies. And finally, prior to the mid 1980s, the Taiwan state had been relatively autonomous from private interests in decision making. However, the state's autonomy and capacity in policy making have been eroded by the emergence of new political and social forces under the political and economic transition. In the case of the LSL revision, on the one hand, partly due to the increasing power of business in national political and economic arenas and partly due to the rise of labor disputes based on workers' demands for their rights under the LSL, the state's executive branch has revised the LSL into a direction of relaxation and deregulation to restore the flexibility of labor market and to preempt the causes of labor disputes. On the other hand, bypassing the executive branch's decision making, autonomous labor groups have sought support from the opposition parties to advance their own versions of the LSL in the Legislative Yuan.