Introduction to the Special Issue: A Comparative Perspective of Union-CSO Coalitions in the East Asian Countries

Abstract

This special issue of Development and Society examines the historical development and current state of coalitions between labor unions and civil society organizations (CSOs) in South Korea (hereafter Korea), Taiwan, and Japan. It focuses on the possibilities and limits of union-CSO coalitions as ways to (re-)establish the labor movements as a counterweight to state, business, and market domination of civil society. Although the three East Asian countries have different trajectories of political and economic development in the postwar period (for example, Korea and Taiwan experienced authoritarian state rule; Japan did not), their labor movements and civil societies share characteristics. They each have decentralized union organizations and civil societies whose spheres of activity tend to be constrained by the state, political parties, and business corporations.The special issue consists of five articles on union-CSO coalitions in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Three articles are about historical evolution of such coalitions in each country, while two articles are on notable contemporary cases of the coalition observed in Korea and Taiwan. It is a meaningful attempt to examine union-CSO coalitions among these nonWestern countries, particularly from the comparative and historical perspective, in that the existing English literature has given little attention to the relationship between labor unions and civil society organizations outside countries in the West.The Challenges Facing Labor Movements in East Asian CountriesLabor movements in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are organizationally decentralized, and enterprise unions are the dominant form of union organization. Industrial unions, a typical form in advanced democracies in the West, were formed only under exceptional circumstances. Unlike labor movements in advanced Western democracies, the labor movements in these three countries, either directly through mobilization or indirectly through political parties representing workers' interests, lacked political power sufficient to promote the development of welfare states that granted universal social rights to workers and their families. In Korea and Taiwan, labor unions under authoritarian rule were repressed by the state (Korea) or tightly controlled by enterprise-level organs of the Kuomintang (the KMT). In Japan, even under formally democratic rule, labor unions came under the hegemonic control of management at the enterprise level after the defeat of class-oriented unions in labor disputes in the 1950s and early 1960s. We should note, though, that, despite their organizational and political weakness, Korean and Taiwanese unions were leading civil society actors in the democratization process in their respective countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s.As the economies of the three countries came under the influence of neo-liberal globalization in the 1990s, their labor movements experienced similar structural changes in labor markets: disparities in wages, working conditions, and employment security between (mostly male) regular workers in large firms, on one hand, and (mainly female and migrant) non-regular workers and workers in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), on the other. The enterprise unions of large private-sector firms and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the core sector are mainly concerned with protecting the economic interests of union members and are unwilling to represent class-wide interests of workers including those precariously employed in the peripheral sector. Deindustrialization and privatization have meant a decline in union ranks. In Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, there has been a corresponding loss in union political influence and social presence. Their labor movements face the challenge of overcoming the representation crisis. Can they reframe their goals and embrace the interests of workers in the peripheral sector, and what strategies should they take to increase union membership and to reassert their role as important actors in civil society? …