Irrelevant or Interconnected? ─the Environmental and Labour Movements Against Electronic Industry in Taiwan

Since the early 1980s, the development of Taiwan’s Science Parks where the electronic industries cluster has been seen as a model of the developmental state’s capacity to hatch a strategic national industry through a process of upgrading and modernisation. The leading industries in Science Park, computer and peripheries, semiconductor and optoelectronics, have been successfully promoted by the government and the corporations as a clean high-tech industry, which is ideal to replace the high pollution one. The industry has been depicted as golden-hen of the national economy because of its economic success and hence Taiwanese society witness a significant expansion of electronic industry and the model of high-tech Science Park. However, the negative environmental impacts, hazardous consequences and social injustice, and the repression of labour right in the industry have gradually emerged since the late 1990s. As a result, the environmental movement activists, community neighbourhoods, farmers and fishermen and farmers’ right campaigners have collaboratively worked in the movement against electronic hazards and the expansion of Science Park since 2005 and the campaigns for electronic employees’ working rights have gradually emerged during 2008 economic crisis. Despite of relating to electronic industry, the two movements have seem remained irreverent in the beginning, but the gradually discovery of the impacts of electronic hazards on both workplace, community and environment, and the lack of social and environmental responsibilities of electronic capital seem to provide the potential interconnected relations between the two movements. This research concerns the relations between the environmental and labour movements in challenging the electronic industry in Taiwan. The author will explore the composition of activists and the trajectory of the two movements, and discover the difficulties and potentials for the formation of environmental-labour alliance challenging the electronic high-tech industry in Taiwan.