The tides of low-wage labor
An even more important factor that daily increases the pressure on workers in Taiwan is the uncertainty and speed of change in Taiwan's business environment.
According to a job stress survey taken in 2001 by the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health of the Council of Labor Affairs, the percentage of men who personally feel highly stressed by their jobs increased from 7.6% in 1994 to 13.8%; the figure for women more than doubled, from 6.5% to 13.5%. There seems to be a trend that Taiwanese are under increasing work-related stress.
Looking more precisely at the sources of stress in life, at the top of the list was work (39%), followed by finances and economic situation (32%), family (10%), and interpersonal relations (5%). Moreover, over half of employees said that they lacked job security, and a full 65% said that they felt that their job had no future.
"Since the coming of the society of uncertain risk around the world in the 20th century, people have had to wonder, 'When is my job going to disappear?' In the past workers worried most that they might lose their jobs to the people around them. Now they worry that they will lose their jobs to the countries around them," says Hsin Ping-lung, an associate professor in the Graduate Institute of National Development at National Taiwan University, who specializes in labor economics. Since the end of the Cold War, the formerly communist states, including China and countries in Eastern Europe, have embarked on a transformation to a capitalist market economy. When you also figure in the rise of countries like India and Brazil in recent years, there has been a sudden increase of more than 1 billion people in the global labor supply. In addition, as communications technology has advanced and globalization has deepened, bosses can now move their factories to another country at a moment's notice. For workers, as they continue to struggle to stay afloat in a "sea of excess labor," uncertainty will become more and more pronounced.
In recent years there has been a dramatic transformation in the economic structure, and all of the major developments-structural unemployment, outsourcing, international competition, changes in the nature of jobs as a result of new information technology, and a widening of the gap between rich and poor-have without exception been blows to the job security of Taiwan's 6 million workers.
Take for example the trend of big corporate mergers. In 2002, international information giants Hewlett-Packard and Compaq merged, and at the end of last year, Lenovo Group Ltd., the number one name in computers in mainland China, bought IBM's personal computer division. The more orders a buyer commands, the better its negotiating position with suppliers, and there has been a definite and immediate impact on the profit margins of Taiwan's OEM tech firms. OEM manufacturers may themselves be forced to follow the merger and acquisition trend in order to resist the collective pressure of the major international giants, but of course any M&A means sweeping reductions in the number of employees, so once again the wage-earner and the "salaryman" will be hurt the most.
Besides intensified international competition, the gun has also sounded in the elimination heats for the domestic electronics industry. Last year, financial problems struck one major firm after another, including Procomp Informatics, Summit Technology, and Unicap Electronics Industrial. Each and every "detonation" not only meant that investors' money disappeared without a trace, but also shattered confidence in job security in the industry.
Even as profit margins for hi-tech OEMs drop from the "guaranteed five" down toward the bottom line, the financial industry-which in recent years has accounted for a huge number of new jobs in the employment market-has also been hit. As the government has announced that the number of financial holding companies will be reduced from 14 to seven, and the number of state-run banks cut in half, waves of personnel shifts have pushed even more people into bitter struggles to protect their jobs.
Looking at job market information, this could be yet another "employment reorganization year." Job security disappears, salary guarantees are eliminated, steady full-time jobs are replaced, there is little prospect of profit sharing, and even the government will be smashing a lot of "iron rice bowls" with the passage of the recent Executive Yuan Organization Standards Act, which will reduce the number of government agencies.
Employers use both "sticks" and "carrots" to encourage (or force) their employees to work hard with financial incentives. The photo shows the lavish dinner party of the Foxconn Group a few days before Chinese New Year. (courtesy of Business Weekly)