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EUGENE COOPER
mined much of the basis for its existence independent of the nationalist carpenters' union.
What was in the early 1950's an extremely sharp distinction between workers in teak/camphorwood as opposed to those in rosewood has lost its currency today. The demand for teak/camphorwood products has declined, brought about largely by the decreasing purchasing power abroad of the American dollar, and until 1972 the increasing value of the Japanese yen. The Japanese preference for products of rosewood created a situation in which many workers in the teak/camphorwood unions who had previously never worked in anything but teak and camphorwood began to take up rosewood carving for the first time in rather large numbers. The influence of the Woodwork Carvers' Union among rosewood workers has grown in proportion to that change and, as mentioned, there is now a movement in progress to amalgamate the Woodwork Carvers' Union and the left wing Rosewood Workers' Union, the latter being the junior partner in numbers.
In any event, it should be clear that the divisions of the labor force that Ch'en Ta described as characteristic of Chinese industry in the 1920's were certainly at work in the labor force of the post war art carved furniture industry in Hong Kong. The traditional divisions of the labor force, however, had become the vehicle by means of which modern political ideologies were expressed. Traditional parochialism had become distilled into a politically more volatile essence.
The first real test of strength between labor and capital occurred in 1960 when workers went out on strike for higher wages. 1960 had marked the climax of economic success and accumulation of capital in the art carved furniture industry in its period of “manufacture", and initiated a period in which strikes occurred with greater regularity, as competing unions came to demand a greater share of the industry's prosperity.
The political divisions of the labor force which were to disrupt the unity of labor in its dealings with capital for the next ten years were now manifest. Communist and nationalist unions carried on separate negotiations. Despite the fact that the declared membership in the communist Woodwork Carvers' Union was greater than the combined total of workers in both the nationalist teak/camphorwood unions, in 1960 it was the numerically inferior nationalist forces which held out longer for a slightly better settlement.