>Yes, this is especially the case in East Asia and Central Europe, where
>Fordism on the American model never really took off, and which
>industrialized on the model of small-lot, high-volume global
>market niches. Taiwan's computer industry is basically a tightly organized
>network of "flexible producers", who do the actual production for
>computer equipment sold by Dell and Gateway; finance and marketing are
>centralized by the Nationalist developmental state, but workplace skills
>and supply lines are decentralized and disseminated on a wide scale,
>thus creating an incredibly efficient and durable industrial base. The
>Swiss and Baden-Wurttemberg machine-tools industries seem to be based on
>similar principles, i.e. consistent and efficient state intervention on
>the level of training, networking, long-term developmental finance and
>whatnot (especially from state-owned regional banks). In turn, Central
>Europe has been a hotbed of ideas for humanization of the workplace, team
>production, breaking down assembly lines into point-and-source production
>and whatnot, often under the aegis of powerful unions (e.g. IG Metall).
>Though unions are pretty weak in Taiwan, they do exist, and it'll be
>interesting to see how the politics of the informatic factory-floor play
>out in Taipei.
As far as I know, there's not a single unionized workplace in the computer
industry here in Taiwan. Even where there's a union, technological issues
are still exclusive realms of management rights. Taiwan Labor Front, a
liberal union alliance, is advocating "Industrial Democratization." They
want to use the German-style co-determination scheme to boost productivity
of state-owned firms so as to avoid privatization. No success so far.
Measures of "humanization," i.e. initiatives to increase direct workers'
control over the labor process (my definition), nevertheless take place with
other mechanisms. Subcontracting is one common way. In the town I live,
Taichung, there are said to be more than 100 thousand company presidents
among 1 million residents. Many of those "presidents" own two or three CNC
machines and hire one helping hand plus his wife. Programming as well as
operating tasks are, needless to say, performed by the same persons.
In fims that operate bigger processes that cannot be feasibly subdivided,
such as computer chip manufacturing, a large chunk of the employee
compensation is in the form of profit-sharing bonusses and stock options so
that workers can be better tied to the capital's interest.
I often find Taiwanese employers are like the "rule-of-thumb" managers, whom
the good old Frederick Taylor sneered at. They seemed to be more at ease
with bullying junior business partners than bossing their own employees.
Scientific management has hardly ever been in fashion.
Talking about this. Does anyone know of any good critique on the ISO-9000s
series of standards? That can be a fun starting point for examining this
recent wave of management reform. Almost all of the big export firms here
have passed some ISO-9000s certification, but I haven't find a single one
adhere to the text.
Dikoh
Hsin-Hsing "Dikoh" Chen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ph. D. Candidate
Dept. of Science and Technology Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
USA
Lecturer,
Dept. of Sociology
Tung-Hai University
Taichung 407
Taiwan
