The new government has shown impressive determination over the maximum work hours issue. There was unanimity after the President's nine-member advisory team made the decision (to revert to a 44-hour workweek). The Executive Yuan's Council of Labor Affairs (
Whether or not we should reverse the 84 hours per fortnight work schedule in favor of a 44-hour workweek is not a simple question. An economic winter is descending on Taiwan. Certainly, not everybody who is worried about layoffs and unemployment can understand the labor groups' insistence on the 84-hour fortnight. But on the other hand, whether or not a longer workweek would salvage Taiwan's economy is far from certain. Industrialists said two fewer work hours a week would increase their annual costs by hundreds of millions of dollars. But a recent issue of The Economist magazine said that people in Taipei work 200 more hours annually than the Shanghainese. Given the difficulty in trying to please both labor and capital, someone in the DPP -- a party brimming with talent and long critical of the KMT government's politician-business cronyism -- should have raised doubts about the appropriateness of the policy reversal, and the wisdom of turning the tables on labor unions. They should also have expressed worries about the possible impact on social justice. In other words, there should have been a leftist voice.
In a pluralistic society, the ruling party does not necessarily have to please laborers on every issue, but a complete lack of leftist voices speaking out for labor could give rise to the danger of leaning too far to the right. British prime minister Tony Blair's adoption of the "Third Way" did not silence the voice of the Labor Party's left wing, as represented by Ken Livingstone. In Germany, left-wing members of the Social Democratic Party who support former finance minister Oscar La Fontaine have remained true to their stance after chancellor Gerhard Schroeder adopted "the new center" (
A few months ago, two US sociologists, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks published a highly acclaimed book entitled It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. They tried to explain why socialist thinking and socialist parties -- which every Western European country has -- are not visible in the US. Certainly, it is a recent problem. Even in a capitalist stronghold like the US, socialism has always had a following, if on a smaller scale and depth than in Western Europe. The Democratic Party, traditionally supported by labor unions, carries a more or less left-wing banner. The Green Party's Ralph Nader has also rallied a growing leftist movement.
Taiwan is a country which truly lacks socialist thinking and a socialist party. Politically, all the parties are rightist. The KMT walked the extreme capitalist road in the past. The DPP, which claimed to sympathize with labor and the underprivileged, is also veering right in every step. Apart from the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant issue, the new government's financial and economic policies are almost identical to those of the old regime. The new government's social welfare policy can only be described as "fragmented," but this is by no means surprising. The DPP is rife with factionalism, but a real leftist faction is nowhere to be seen. There is no lack of gurus well-versed in Taiwan independence theories, but socialist thinkers are unheard of. The DPP's unanimous stance on the work hours issue, therefore, is attributable to a paucity of leftist thinking.
Where is the leftist voice in the DPP? The party's legislators should ask themselves: Why is everyone leaning to the right on the working hours issue?
Huang Jui-ming is an assistant professor at the Department of Labor Relations, National Chung Cheng University.
Translated by Francis Huang
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