Session Name: Emerging Industry and Labour issues in High-tech Asia
Beyond the Model Workers: Emerging Labour Politics in the Cultural and Creative Economy of Taiwan
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: Scholarship on the cultural and creative workers in Asia has discussed a myriad of precarious situations, including political control and economic precarities, such as censorship and self-exploitation. However, creative workers’ criticism, resistance and activism remain understudied. This article attends to the emerging labour politics in Taiwanese cultural and creative economy, also emerging in other parts of Asia, by focusing on the actions that Taiwanese below-the-line professionals in the film and television industry have taken for better working conditions and treatment from their employers, a complex global-local coalition of the business and state in the local and the Subscription Video-on-Demand platforms from the West. The discussion is structured in three parts. First, it delineates the emergence of the politics by tracing how these activists build network. Second, it discusses the actions they took: the application of local labour and employment laws to film and television productions and the development of film and television production safety manuals. Third, it looks at how they confront employers and refuse widely circulated discourses that govern subjects in the industry under neoliberalism. Demonstrating a manner similar to what Foucault said about parrhesia (fearless speech), they criticize frankly the reality in this hierarchical industry full of self-enterprising, yet incompetent professionals.
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