In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan's Economic Restructuring. Anru Lee

Abstract

In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan's Economic Restructuring, by Anru Lee. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. xvi + 196 pp. US$45.00 (hardcover). Lee Anru's interesting and very readable book about the lives of factory women in Taiwan spans the period when Taiwan was in transition from an agrarian economy (1970s) to an export-oriented manufacturing economy (1980s) and finally to a deindustrializing economy (late 1980s into the 1990s), with laborintensive factories relocating en masse offshore. Based on fieldwork conducted in a small textile city in central Taiwan, the book sensitively examines the labor and gender politics in the textile industry. Lee looks at the connections in capital accumulation, shifts in work organization and discourses on work ethics, and the formation of women's subjectivity. She focuses in particular on five of the women workers she befriended during her fieldwork. Lee provides a backdrop for her study through a chronology of Taiwan's political economy, using the rise and decline of the textile industry as a case study. Many previous scholarly studies have pointed out that Taiwanese industrialization was characterized by the development of family-based small and medium-sized enterprises. Lee describes how the family operating a small enterprise exercises patriarchal domination over its younger female members. Chapter 3 discusses how these family enterprises had to adjust continuously in the use of labor to the competitive forces of globalization. When Taiwan was still poor, factory jobs were eagerly sought after by farming families, who terminated their daughters' schooling and sent them to labor for long hours in nearby factories, appropriating most of their income. As Taiwan became a prosperous consumer society with a developed service industry, young women took up jobs in the service sector and there was a shortage of labor. Factories that did not relocate offshore (mainly to China) by the late eighties began to cut labor costs by importing labor from surrounding Asian countries. But there was still a demand for young Taiwanese women workers to maintain a stable workforce. Due to the labor shortage, the young women who started working in the 1990s could afford to adopt more lax work ethics, and were better paid than the imported workers. On the other hand, middle-aged Taiwanese women workers felt threatened by a shrinking sector and the presence of foreign workers. next two chapters constitute the book's core. Chapter 4, The Meaning of Work, tells the story of three female factory workers of three industrial generations (as opposed to biological generations), whose ages are a total of 15 years apart. Lee shows how their working and family lives changed as Taiwanese experienced economic restructuring. She reveals in intimate detail how they were all victims of a patriarchal system. eldest was born in 1961. In the 1970s she began working hard in a factory to help support her parents and siblings. She then got married, had a child, and resumed working in the same factory to contribute to her own nuclear family. This is a success story, in that her husband did quite well after he become his own boss. second of the three women also worked hard to support her parents, but was able to find identity and a sense of liberation and meaning in life by joining a religious sect of non-married factory women who devote their spare time to doing good deeds. youngest of the three was a nineteen-year-old in 1994 and had already worked for five years in a factory. She wanted to resume her schooling, but was not allowed to, as her mother held to the traditional belief that girls did not have to study because they would get married and leave home. Lee describes the constant tension experienced by these young women, pulled between surrendering to the cultural demand to earn money for the family and their search for a way to live their own lives. …