Experiences under the Political and Economy of Taiwan and Australia: Gender, Body and Nationalism on Working Holiday

• Main Authors: CHEN CHIH-SI, 陳稚璽
• Other Authors: HSIA HSIAO-CHUAN
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67488113128518332293

碩士 === 世新大學 === 性別研究所 === 105 === Taiwan has signed a working holiday agreement with Australia at the end of2004. It is deemed as a reciprocal policy that has been promoting cultural exchanges and international perspectives among the youths. In the past 13 years, over 100,000young people have joined working holiday program and it is an enthusiastical phenomenon. This thesis adopts the world system theory, analyzing the structure behind such transnational labor from political economic perspectives. It further examines Taiwan’s economic development, labor market, and educational system and Australia’s immigration, labor, and economic development, and how Taiwan’s brain drain echoed with Australia’s labor shortage, consolidating an alternative route for Taiwan’s youths participating in the global labor mobility. With 12 interviewees and the researcher’s personal working holiday experiences in Australia, this thesis reveals how Taiwan and Australia solve their “labor crisis” caused by the international division of the capitalist globalization in an institutional and reciprocal way ── a bilateral working holiday agreement. Additionally, under the scope of this working holiday program, Taiwan’s youth mostly get jobs in the labor intensive, primary industries, and often experience the gendered division of labor. Therefore, this thesis explores the gender division of labor from gender and feminist perspectives, depicting the true condition of gender, body, and nationalism of Taiwanese youth via gender division issues, gender wage gap and how management and monitoring mechanism affect these people physically.