Base-building, identity construction, labor organizing, staying power, student movements, youth labor movements
High school, college, and graduate students
Community and youth organizers
Labor organizers and union leaders
Civil society leaders
Faced with limited resources, how can a youth-focused labor NGO support young workers who need help now while also building longterm organizing power?
Introduction
THIS CASE STUDY FOCUSES ON THE YOUTH LABOR UNION 95 (YLU95), a labor NGO based in Taipei, Taiwan. Founded in 2008, YLU95 organizes workers around issues particularly relevant to young people, including youth poverty, holiday work, minimum wage violations, and insurance evasion. The organization is well known for its comprehensive legal casework, for launching high-profile demonstrations and media campaigns on behalf of its clients, and most recently, for numerous successful efforts to unionize and foster collective bargaining power among young workers.
Although it is well established today, in YLU95’s early years, organizers faced challenges that threatened the long-term viability of their efforts. In particular, it struggled to keep individual clients involved in the union’s larger strategic efforts after their cases were resolved. Recognizing that casework did not give young workers an opportunity to form broader connections and build a sense of camaraderie or encourage allyship with the greater labor movement, YLU95 faced a choice-point in determining a new strategy to address the general lack of collective identity among young workers in Taipei.
Through the lens of a labor rights organization, this case study specifically focuses on the trade-offs between short-term wins (e.g., public demonstrations) and long-term organizing power (e.g., unionization, collective action, etc.).
How can labor organizers effectively build relationships among workers who have long fallen through the cracks of traditional union representation? What could YLU95 do to foster a sense of collective identity among young workers? Is organizing young workers in and of itself a sustainable organizing strategy for the larger labor movement?
Learning Objectives
By the end of this case study, you should be able to:
1. Appreciate the importance and distinctiveness of youth issues in labor politics.
2. Understand the unique challenges of organizing young workers in particular.
3. Understand the benefits and tradeoffs of working toward short-term aid vs. long-term systemic change.
4. Understand the function of identity construction in a sustainable, effective youth movement generally.
5. Identify examples of effective organizing on university campuses.
Case Narrative
Background: The Youth Turn in Taiwanese Labor Politics
The length and predictability of the workday are central issues in labor organizing across the world. Labor unions fight not only for higher wages, but also for work week regularity, overtime formulas, and scheduling protections. Securing a higher hourly wage, for instance, would not immediately translate into an improvement in working conditions without complementary protections against underwork, overwork, zero-hour contracts, and the predatory expansion of part-time work.
A number of Taiwan’s high-profile labor struggles have thus centered on legislation over working hours, with some success. In 2000, and again in 2015, the country’s working hours were incrementally shortened with revisions to the Labor Standards Act. However, the labor movement faced serious setbacks between 2017 and 2018 as the result of policy flip-flopping under President Tsai Ing-wen.
During her presidential campaign of 2016, Tsai Ing-wen campaigned on a labor policy that would bring workers two full “leave days” per week, which would close an existing loophole in the Labor Standards Act that allowed employers to distribute 40 hours across six days without having to pay overtime.1 However, after she secured the presidency, her party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), backtracked on its promise to push for two full leave days. Moreover, although the party was able to secure other improvements to working conditions—such as the creation of a more employee-friendly formula for calculating overtime and rest days—the DPP put forth a set of proposals to the Labor Standards Act that abandoned other pro-worker promises, such as reinstating Taiwan’s seven national holidays.
In the wake of the DPP’s proposed revisions, labor union leaders “were conspicuously silent,” having splintered over debates about the relative value of winning overtime formulas versus losing Taiwan’s national holidays.2 As a result, the public, especially young people, began to lose confidence in the ability of union leaders to steward the labor movement.
Young workers in Taiwan (and abroad) are the group most likely to be employed in industries that have not established collective bargaining or representation rights. They are likewise more likely to be “atypically employed” in internships, part-time, and gig jobs, and restricted to work that is unpredictable, contingent, and not eligible for benefits or insurance. Working under these conditions, young workers as a demographic group often face precarious employment situations and chronically slip through the cracks of traditional union representation.3
The frustration of young workers became evident in the shifting demographic profile of participants in the 2016–2018 labor demonstrations. Frustrated by the failure of union leaders to represent the interests of young workers, young people took to the streets, marking what scholars have dubbed “the youth-turn” in Taiwan’s labor politics.
By 2018, independent youth activists affiliated with regional labor unions and other local movement organizations took the helm of labor campaigns that had been led by national labor union presidents in the previous decades. This shift in leadership followed complaints of union leaders’ conservative tendencies, outdated tactics, and numerous failures to win legislative battles and sustained victories. Many perceived that national unions had forfeited their leadership in Taiwan’s labor politics. The working-hour movement saw a steady trend toward deinstitutionalization—characterized by a shift from hierarchical leadership structures and well-defined organizational boundaries to improvised flash-mobs and “digitally connective action”—ultimately culminating in its transformation into a youth-led protest movement.4 Previously scripted rallies became spontaneous disruptions as the mantle was passed to a new generation of labor activists.
The question of how to strengthen and sustain young people’s engagements with and commitments to the labor movement to secure wins for young workers became more pressing than ever.
The Youth Labor Union 95
The Youth Labor Union 95 is widely recognized among Taiwanese activists for its ability to provide effective casework support for workers. The organization “provides legal consultations, participates in worker-management negotiations, and even organizes press conferences to draw greater attention to these cases.”5 The group began in 2004 as an informal support network and had been quietly expanding its reach among Taipei’s recent college graduates. The organization formalized in 2008, at the height of Taiwan’s struggle for the NT$95 minimum wage. Adopting this push as their calling-card issue, its members named themselves the Youth Labor Union 95.6
Despite its name, YLU95 is not technically a union but rather a labor NGO. Its status allows YLU95 to broaden its focus beyond a single company or industry, enabling it to reach young workers employed across retail, food service, salons, and other sectors, and reach those in atypical positions—e.g., seasonal jobs, internships, etc. YLU95’s mission is to represent young workers who are far less likely or able to advocate for their rights or organize within their workplace, compared to their adult counterparts.
In its early years, YLU95 relied almost entirely on personal connections and word-of-mouth to organize workers. It eventually developed a telephone hotline through which individuals could request legal aid and guidance in disputes with their employers. As the organization grew and developed a reputation as a source for legal casework, it built up a large activist network and membership base.
In these years, however, the future of YLU95 was not yet clear. Leadership faced difficult choices about the trade-offs between individual casework and collective action.
Building Organizational Staying Power
Like many other youth movements, YLU95 had difficulty building organizational staying power. While YLU95 hoped that its casework would spur young workers to lead unionization efforts at their workplaces or to initiate collective bargaining with their employers, instead, the individuals it helped often fell out of contact once their cases were resolved.7
YLU95 organizers recognized that they lacked the human and financial resources needed to address this challenge. As an NGO, the organization could not collect membership dues to fund its programs; instead, it primarily relied on small individual donations, resource-sharing networks with other labor organizations, and the rare strategic partnership with city governments. YLU95 could not afford to take on the large-scale organizing campaigns that trade unions traditionally used to mobilize collective action. Such campaigns were often resource-intensive, requiring boots on the ground to engage workers in collective action. Its precarious funding situation and its resistance to traditional labor practices also made some leaders hesitant to commit to expensive campaigns. Some leaders preferred to identify smaller, experimental projects that enabled them to innovate on their organizing practice.
Organizers were thus confronted with the following strategic questions related to building and sustaining organizational power:
• How could YLU95 more effectively organize its casework clients to build power for youth workers?
• How could YLU95 most effectively leverage its unique organizational status and limited financial resources to support young workers?
• What projects could it start now, given that the alliance was hesitant to commit to expensive future projects and preferred to experiment with smaller projects?
• Where was YLU95 needed most?
It was this last question especially, about where the organization was needed most, that served to guide its strategy in the coming years. Leaders were forced to ask themselves, “Why do all these young workers seem to have such little long-term interest in joining the alliance?”
Once YLU95 leaders reflected upon the nature of the kind of casework they were doing, the answer emerged quite naturally. Most of the calls received by the YLU95 hotline focused on “individual labor rights, not issues of collective action.”8 For instance, organizers report that their casework primarily involved services like “providing relevant legal information, assisting the aggrieved workers in sending legal attest lettersi to their employers, applying for mediation from the [Council of Labor Affairs], or accompanying the workers during mediation or negotiations with management.”9 Most of the organization’s work focused on individualistic, near-term conflict resolution in isolated workplace situations—an apprentice at a single beauty salon, one or two students employed at a chain restaurant, etc. As a result, most casework involved giving advice to an individual or approaching an employer on behalf of a few workers.
In an external report, YLU95 organizers expressed frustration that this way of engaging young workers did not encourage building relationships among workers generally; it made it difficult to exert collective pressure on the employers (relying instead on appeals to labor laws); and it meant that unionization was always a nebulous goal down the road, as callers were primarily concerned with the immediate resolution of their particular situation.
Young Workers and Identity Construction
YLU95 organizers noted several reasons why it was particularly difficult to move young workers from individual casework to collective action. Given the lack of social identification with a career or profession, many young workers failed to see their cases as representative of the larger plight of young workers.
Vera Chen , a YLU95 director, explains that “the life-trajectories of young workers have often not been finalized/decided’’ such that “even if they are working, they might not think that they will work all their lives, let alone for the same company or industry.”10 For her, young workers are notoriously difficult to organize given their hesitance to relate to the social status and category of a worker.
In contrast to older workers who are more likely to identify with their jobs or careers—after having worked for years in the same industry or under the same employer—young workers are more likely to work in non-career jobs that are perceived as temporary. Under these conditions, young workers lack the “worker” identity or consciousness that traditional organizing strategies presuppose.
In addition, YLU95 found it particularly difficult to maintain a stable base of existing members, stemming from the fact that the category of “young workers” remains a highly “mobile” and “transient” identity. Young workers, after all, are constantly aging in and out of the social category, e.g., they grow out of part-time work and atypical jobs, move industries, or simply cease self-identifying as a young person. Taken together, this means that the organizational base of YLU95 turns over every few years.
This poses numerous obstacles to the survival of the organization: its membership base lacks a stable core of permanent members from which the leadership team can be renewed. (Currently, many of the leaders can no longer be considered young workers themselves.) Additionally, much of the organization’s energy must be spent on recruiting as existing members age out.
Not only was the possibility of mounting sustained collective action hampered by these conditions, but YLU95’s strategy of emphasizing individual casework did almost nothing to address these foundational problems.
Having realized that casework neither gave young workers an opportunity to connect with one another, nor helped build a sense of camaraderie or allyship with the greater labor movement, the organizers at YLU95 began to articulate the need to redirect its energy toward broader outreach to young workers in general. It needed to engage young workers long before those workers contacted the organization through its casework telephone hotline.
What Would You Do?
By 2016, YLU95 faced a difficult decision. Given its limited resources, it could continue to confine itself to individual conflict resolution, which it did well, or it could take a risk and redirect resources into organizing programs that could secure systemic wins for young workers. Its current strategy, despite achieving isolated results, was still indisputably helpful for many of the young workers that reached out to YLU95. What would it look like to redirect some of its resources from individual assistance into collective organizing programs? Herein lay the potential trade-off: a reallocation of resources towards long-term power consolidation might mean that YLU95 would have to begin turning down young workers who desperately needed help, a prospect that none of the organizers were excited about. Yet, at the same time, leaders were increasingly inspired by the political spirit of the day—as political movements in Taiwan moved towards more deinstitutionalized, digitally connected forms, leaders wondered how they might leverage this energy to mobilize young workers and build a more sustainable membership base.
Active Engagement Moment: What would you do if you were on the YLU95’s leadership board?
• What are the balances between short-term aid and long-term systemic change? Is individual casework sufficient in its own right?
• In this context, what are the benefits of re-organization and what are the tradeoffs?
• Are these trade-offs worth it? Consider the question of what kind of responsibility these organizers would have in addition to, or instead of, their current clients and casework regime.
• What are some ways organizers could modify their current model to encourage camaraderie and long-term power-building?
Active Engagement Moment: If YLU95 decides to take on the longer-term work of consciousness raising, what activities should it pursue? How can YLU95 maximize the impact of such campaigns? Where and when are there critical opportunities for young people to relate to one another as young workers?
• Brainstorm a few sites (physical locations) and times in one’s life (age or time of day/week/month) where you think young workers would be most open to exploring and learning about labor rights and structural experiences. Note that the organization has minimal financial and human resources. Activities should be local and led by small leadership teams of a maximum of three organizers.
Once you have an idea of what you would do, what are some next steps you would implement? What would be some key challenges that might arise? What are some expected payoffs? Then, discuss to what extent your solution would address the core dilemmas:
• Assuming the solution is successful: are more young workers aware of the systemic problems of certain forms of youth employment, as a result?
• Does the campaign open new avenues for YLU95 to recruit and maintain a committed membership base?
How it Turned Out
Organizers ultimately felt that, by the time young workers contacted YLU95’s hotline, they were already emotionally drained, dispossessed, and too focused on their own crisis situations to be open to matters of joining the alliance or the larger movement. Court dates and emotional legal battles left these workers with little capacity to engage with YLU95 besides receiving immediate help. Organizers thus believed that their best option was to reach out to young people before they found themselves in such dire straits. Leaders resolved to redirect YLU95’s resources toward more experimental modes of recruitment and identity construction in order to foster organizational staying power.
YLU95 leaders reasoned that university campuses would be the most effective site to reach young workers before they went into crisis. Thus, in 2016, leaders began to redirect resources toward activities that would foster identity construction among student workers employed in the commercial areas surrounding universities.
When asked to describe YLU95’s methods of engagement, Ray Cheng , the organization’s chairman, detailed two rounds of surveys that were conducted on university campuses (see Figures 1-3) that simultaneously allowed the organization to better understand students’ needs while also raising awareness of youth labor issues.11 The organization, he described, surveyed students with part-time jobs about their employers’ compliance with labor laws and their general working conditions. It then collectively produced a physical map of the university campus and surrounding commercial areas that compared wages (Figures 1 and 2) and highlighted locations where illegal practices and dangerous working conditions had been reported (Figure 3).
Zhixue Street Wage Distribution Map 1. At the time of the survey, the hourly minimum wage in Taiwan was NT$120. The map documents the hourly wage of nearly 39 stores on Zhixue Street, 24 of which are reported to be in violation of minimum wage laws. Hence, organizers adopted the subtitle “the uglier the wage, the uglier the map” (author’s translation; see Appendix for original Chinese).
Zhixue Street Wage Map 2.0. A follow-up survey was conducted two weeks after the compilation of Zhixue Street Wage Map 1.0. This map includes store-reported data on 36 stores where, now, six stores are shown to be in violation of minimum wage laws (author’s translation; see Appendix for original Chinese).
Wage Distribution around Zhongyang University. The map depicts 37 stores around Zhongyang University that have been reported by student employees to be in violation of Taiwan’s labor laws (author’s translation; see Appendix for original Chinese).
Through the process of creating these maps, the organization achieved a number of its original goals:
• Using focus groups and participatory sessions, it came into direct contact with young workers who would then go on to spread the survey to their peers;
• After co-creating and sharing the map with all respondents as well as the community at large, organizers were able to bring together the experiences of many disparate individuals who may have not yet identified with one another;
• Having visualized their shared experience in this way, YLU95 promoted the construction of workers’ identities on university campuses, forming invaluable relationships to later draw on in the organization of demonstrations and collective action;
• YLU95 thus raised awareness among student workers and brought them into a support network long before they found themselves in need of legal casework.
By reorienting its programing towards building solidarity and collective identity among young workers, moving beyond their sole focus on individual casework, YLU95 prioritized building the long-term power not only of its organization, but the larger youth labor movement in Taiwan.
Where traditional unions and more mature labor organizations would likely have faced resistance to such a shift in mission, YLU95 stood in a uniquely favorable position to make this pivot, i.e. as an agile, youth-run, youth-focused organization.
The relatively plastic nature of its membership base (mostly college students, with cohorts passing through the organization within the span of a few years) meant that YLU95’s institutional memory had not become so calcified as to hold them back from adopting experimental programs like the campus surveys. This fact, in combination with the prevalent self-understanding that YLU95 represented a more innovative and flexible alternative to traditional labor unions in Taiwan, meant that when the YLU95 faced existential questions about its future, as well as its mission and impact, it did not shrink from the risks of reinvention.
While the organization continued investing in its casework program up to 2018, it had begun redirecting resources to engage university students by 2016. Today, the organization works with students across a network of over a hundred universities, putting on activities such as the map survey to raise awareness of the rights of young workers. It set up institutional relationships with university clubs and student associations, creating pipelines to its own organization as well as industry-specific unions in the area (medical students, department store workers, etc.). Doing so has developed a more stable membership base for YLU95, enabling them to organize large-scale, multi-issue demonstrations with local activists at the annual Autumn Fight—a joint demonstration bringing together activists and organizations across issue areas in the local Taipei area—and stage high profile strikes against employers. Drawing from loyal and deeply rooted networks on university campuses, it could draw large numbers of youth workers to these events.
Despite these clear wins, the organization’s leaders still had to contend with the widely held concern that once YLU95 exited the legal space, many young workers would be left without legal support. After all, “over a period of more than two years, YLU95 [had] handled 116 separate grievance claims, fighting to get more than NT$2 million in wages and insurance payments paid out by employers.“12 According to reports by local labor journalists, YLU95 was one of the few resources these young workers had. They drew their leadership from a very small population of local graduate students in social work and labor law programs, meaning that not many other organizations were qualified and willing to provide pro bono legal advice.
Organizers, in reflecting on those early choice points, have remained confident with their choice to reprioritize identity construction and solidarity-building over individual casework. While the stakes for YLU95 leaders were no doubt high, it would be a mistake to understand the YLU95 as having abandoned their clients in making this strategic shift. In fact, throughout our interviews, leaders took special care to emphasize the broad scope of their new work. Organizing, they explained, was not only about the services one could provide; nor was it merely a matter of coming together around working conditions or wages. Rather:
This is only one part of our lives as workers. You also have to make sure that [young workers] have emotional support, or social support. It’s not just about organizing them, you have to speak to the other dimensions of their lives that are apart from work but still conditioned by work. You have to talk with them, you have to make sure that they feel comfortable to work with you, not just because you are the union activist, or because you are the organizer, but because you share a community with common interests.13
We can say, then, that while the leadership of YLU95 were no doubt concerned at the prospect of leaving many of their former client base without support, they simultaneously saw great merit in using new programming to bolster the broader social foundations of organizing—foundations that could create new, more sustainable forms of resource-sharing and even long-term wins, a potential that could not be secured solely through a service-based, casework approach.
Felicia S. Jing is a political science PhD student at Johns Hopkins University, an SNF Agora Student Fellow, and a graduate student researcher at Democracy Moves. She specializes in the subfields of political theory and international relations, and her research interests include political economy, democratic theory, and critical security studies. She has previously conducted fieldwork in China and Hong Kong on issues of digital statecraft and netizen activism.
Scott Warren is an SNF Agora Visiting Fellow and a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund (GMF). He is the founder Generation Citizen, where he now serves on the board of directors. He is currently organizing a global network of youth activists and scholars focused on promoting democracy, called Democracy Moves, and working with GMF’s Fortifying Democracy initiative to investigate how cities can promote civic participation and democratic engagement.
How to Use the Case
Unlike many case studies, ours do not focus on individual leaders or other decision-makers. Instead, the SNF Agora case studies are about choices that groups make collectively. Therefore, these cases work well as prompts for group discussions. The basic question in each case is: “What would we do?”
After reading a case, some groups role-play the people who were actually involved in the situation, treating the discussion as a simulation. In other groups, the participants speak as themselves, discussing the strategies that they would advocate for the group described in the case. The person who assigns or organizes your discussion may want you to use the case in one of those ways.
When studying and discussing the choices made by real-life decision-makers (often under intense pressure), it is appropriate to exhibit some humility. You do not know as much about their communities and circumstances as they did, and you do not face the same risks. If you had the opportunity to meet these individuals, it might not be your place to give them advice. We are not asking you to second-guess their actual decisions as if you were wiser than they were.
However, you can exhibit appropriate respect for these decision-makers while also thinking hard about the possible choices that they could have made, weighing the pros and cons of each option, and seriously considering whether they made the best choices or should have acted differently. That is a powerful way of learning from their experience. Often the people described in our cases had reflected on previous examples, just as you can do by thinking about their situation.
Footnotes
i. Letters certifying something that the writer personally witnessed or knows something to be true.
1. Ming-Sho Ho, “From Unionism to Youth Activism: Taiwan’s Politics of Working Hours,” China Information 34, no.3 (2020): 413.
2. Ho, “From Unionism to Youth Activism: Taiwan’s Politics of Working Hours.”
3. For further analysis of this trend internationally, see R. Pedersini, “Trade Union Strategies to Recruit New Groups of Workers,” Dublin, Ireland: Eurofound (June 13, 2010), and Maite Tapia and Lowell Turner, “Renewed Activism for the Labor Movement: The Urgency of Young Worker Engagement,” Work and Occupations (July 11, 2018).
4. Ho, “From Unionism to Youth Activism: Taiwan’s Politics of Working Hours,” 418.
5. Lin Hsin-ching, “Youth Labor Union 95: A Voice for Young Workers,” trans. by Jonathan Barnard, Taiwan Panorama (January 2010).
6. Hsin-ching, “Youth Labor Union 95: A Voice for Young Workers.”
7. Hsin-ching, “Youth Labor Union 95: A Voice for Young Workers.”
8. Por-Yee Lin, “Strategies and Challenges for the Youth Labour Movement: The Experience of ‘Youth Labor Union 95’ in Taiwan,” Asia Monitor Resource Centre (September 2010).
9. Lin, “Strategies and Challenges for the Youth Labour Movement: The Experience of ‘Youth Labor Union 95’ in Taiwan.”
10. Chen, interview by Felicia Jing, January 11, 2021.
11. Cheng, interview by Felicia Jing, December 15, 2020.
12. Hsin-ching, “Youth Labor Union 95: A Voice for Young Workers.”
13. Chou, interview by Felicia Jing, December 20, 2020.
Appendix: YLU95 Wage Maps in Original Chinese
Zhixue Street Wage Map 1.0.
Zhixue Street Wage Map 2.0.
Wage Distribution around Zhongyang University.