There have recently been a number of heartbreaking news stories, including incidents of university students wounding others or harming themselves, as well as the sudden fatal heart attack of Huang Pu-wen (黃卜文), the 54-year-old founder of the Show Ba homeware chain.
Maybe everyone should have a day off to think about what is really achieved from the endless pursuit of efficiency, economic development and ratings.
Since about 70 percent of men are employed full or part-time, they are the most affected by the rat race. Slogans about “putting the economy first” are ubiquitous.
Although Taiwan is a patriarchal society in which men enjoy varying degrees of “patriarchal dividend” — depending on their age and social class — it does come at a heavy price.
Who would have thought that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), following a freeze in negotiations with opposition parties and without time for due consideration, would use an extraordinary legislative session to hasten through the second and third readings of the government’s proposed amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) and pass them into law?
Before the amendments were approved, Article 32, Paragraph 2 of the act said that when an employer must require employees to work beyond regular working hours, the overtime combined with the regular working hours may not exceed 12 hours per day, and the total amount of overtime may not exceed 46 hours per month.
Nonetheless, there are many workers who work more than 100 under-the-table hours a month.
The act has now been amended to relax this upper limit from 46 to 54 hours, supposedly to give businesses enough flexibility to make them more competitive.
According to figures from 2016, Taiwanese worked an average of 2,034 hours per year, which is the sixth-highest of all Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development nations. What is to be made of this?
In addition to raising the upper limit for monthly overtime hours, the amendments cut the minimum interval between rotating work shifts and changed the rule that workers must get one fixed day off every seven days to instead allow for two fixed days off every 14 days, which means that workers might be required to work 12 days in a row.
These changes will have a far-reaching effect on work conditions, family relations and social lives, not to mention the nation’s economic development.
The government and employers insist that the changes are necessary for economic development and to respond to supply and demand, but little attention is devoted to the effects they will have on employees’ family lives and relationships, their young and teenage children, and their personal development and social interactions.
This issue is not just a matter of hours or economic development — it involves conflicting core values about how people are supposed to live.
These developments bring to mind Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s 1881 short story What Men Live By.
As a young and inexperienced university student, I took a course in Russian language and Chinese and Russian comparative literature, and even fantasized about representing Taiwan as a diplomat in Russia.
Reading Tolstoy’s story as part of our coursework, I gained some insights that transcend time and borders. Even now, when I feel tired of life, I sometimes pick up the book and reread it.
In the story, God tells an angel to go down to Earth and not return until he has found the answers to three questions: What dwells in man, what is not given to man and what do men live by?
The answer the angel finds to the first question is: “In man dwells love.”
If you see someone who is cold and hungry, even if you do not have much money or warm clothing to give, you can still share your bread and offer them a place to stay.
In modern-day Taiwan, where the gap between rich and poor keeps getting wider, people should think hard about whether and how resources could be redistributed and about how workers and employers could negotiate agreements about work hours when they are clearly in unequal positions.
The answer to the question “what is not given to man?” is: “It is not given to man to know his own needs.”
In the story, a man wants to get a pair of boots he can wear year-round, not realizing that he will not live to see the next day.
Nobody knows when their life will end, and anyone, be they a driver or a businessperson, can die suddenly. People might get two fixed days off every 14 days, but who can be sure they will get those two days off after working 12 days in a row?
The answer the angel finds to the last question, “what do men live by?” is: “All men live not by care for themselves, but by love.”
People are not born independent and self-sufficient; everyone depends on one another. People need doctors and nurses to be on duty. Vehicles are useless without drivers and mechanics. Everyone needs cleaners and road-repair workers to keep the environment clean and safe.
Modern city life makes people more interdependent than ever. For most, the days of self-sufficiency are long gone, perhaps never to return.
People depend on each other in all sorts of ways. Would you want to ride in a bus driven by someone who has worked for unbearably long hours? The moment a passenger boards a bus, the driver and passenger face life and death together. In an overtiring work environment, in an overworked nation where people spend most of their time in a state of mental and physical exhaustion, they have neither the time nor the energy to think about the purpose of life, to sort out their priorities, to look after their families and work, or to maintain their personal relationships.
The common-sense education that people should give to their teenage children gets delayed again and again. Working day in, day out with no time to rest can also lead to depression.
Of course, no one gets around to thinking of ways to innovate and reform the economy or to imagine diverse possibilities for happiness. If this is true of working people, it is probably also true of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the rest of her administration.
What is the purpose of life, really? What are you living for? Working hard for longer hours will not lead to an answer and it definitely cannot lead to solutions for today’s economic development problems.
Being able to work and raise a family independently is an important and respectable thing, former licensed prostitute “Auntie” Li-chun (麗君) of the Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters once said.
While working hard and pursuing economic development, Taiwanese society also needs to concern itself with empathy and ethics. People need to think critically about care among communities, the power differential between capital and labor, and the political, social and economic structures among which people seek to survive.
Only then can sustainable, satisfying and equal working, and family lives in which everyone can coexist prosperously, be obtained.
Despite the retrograde amendments to the labor act that the DPP forced through on Wednesday last week, hopefully everyone in Taiwan, no matter their social class, will keep fighting for justice.
Chen Yi-chien is a professor at Shih Hsin University’s Graduate Institute for Gender Studies and a member of the Awakening Foundation’s supervisory board.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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