He also looks at the labor problems of the tanning industry today. The work is dirty, smelly, arduous, and poses possible heath problems. The need, therefore, is -- unsurprisingly -- to find a "docile" labor force. His study covered 72 tannery owners and 4,300 tannery workers (leather tanning factories are not, on the whole, large-scale operations), and the tactics followed to find the required docility were fairly uniform.
First, rural workers were used rather than urban ones. Secondly, older workers were felt to be less likely to complain. Thirdly, women were more often employed than men. And lastly, foreign labor was frequently resorted to.
Scott Simon makes the usual obeisances to Karl Marx, routinely found in academics in the humanities these days although laughably double-faced in a place such as Taiwan. To his credit, however, he admits that Marxist theory sometimes doesn't apply where he's researching. But questions as to whether women are less "class-conscious" than men, and whether the KMT redistributed land in order to prevent the formation of working-class solidarity, are nonetheless raised.
Simon is on much surer ground when he looks at attitudes toward, and of, Taiwan's migrant workers. He claims they were paid between NT$15,800 and NT18,000 a month, plus board and lodging, during the period of his researches, though my less systematic inquiries have encountered stories of as much as two-thirds of this money even today being lost to agents in both Taiwan and the home country, witholding tax, and so on.
He also describes the racial myths adhering to various South-east Asian nations -- Indonesians slow but honest, Thais docile, Filipinos more used to unions and therefore more likely to protest about working conditions. He discounts these, being for the most part on the side of the workers. What he doesn't examine, however, are the equally potent myths prevalent among academics who look to Marx for their guiding principles.
There are paradoxes, however, that Simon doesn't include in his book. One of these is that the KMT and the DPP are both equally vigorously anti-Communist -- not equally anti-China, perhaps, but in both cases anti-Communist to the last man. Even so, there are other, and interesting, comparisons made here, even if in essence this is a book for novices in the study of Taiwanese affairs.
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