• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.45-73
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• 2014

This study analyzes the effect of labor unions in Korean manufacturing industry on wage variance of men from 1988 to 2012. The results are as follows. Firstly, the wage variance within establishments is higher than that between establishments, and the wage variance between establishments in the non-union sector has increased significantly compared to that in the union sector since 2000. There is strong evidence that the latter is due to the solidarity wage policy of unions which has strengthened since the early 2000s. Secondly, the influence of labor unions on the wage structure within the union sector has gotten stronger recently despite the general drop in the labor union membership. Thirdly, since the mid-1990s labor unions have contributed to reducing the overall wage variance. It implies that decline in the unionization rate over the years in Korea is likely to have contributed to increasing wage inequality.

• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.81-126
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• 2014

Localization of overseas Korean companies has been regarded as one of vital tasks or strategies for decades. However, labor relations have not been the main object of Korean academic researchers. In this paper, I attempt to analyze strategies of localization in labor relations adopted by overseas Korean companies through a qualitative case study of PT. Miwon Indonesia, which has run business successfully for 40 years with recently achieved industrial peace. The company minimized Korean staffs and maximized Indonesian staffs. It pays more than minimum wage, and observes labor law when using outsourcing workers. The managers of the company recognize their labor union as management partner and support union activities through paying bonus for the union head and travel allowances for solidarity gatherings. There is no discrimination between plural unions. Furthermore, collective bargaining is led by indigenous managers according to the musyawarah, a local principle of bargaining. Therefore, PT. Miwon Indonesia could be regarded as a forerunner of localization in labor management among Korean companies in Indonesia. Miwon's case will serve a useful reference when discussing localization of labor management strategies.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.57
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• pp.69-83
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• 2012

This paper attempts to explore the development of the media labor movement and its tasks. Due to the unique characteristics of information delivered by media, the media labor movement under the authoritarian regime was oppressed and regulated by the government. As democratization has proceeded, the state's oppression and regulation of media has been weakened. However, media workers should wage the struggle for union recognition and independence of editorship simultaneously. Because media unions as labor market organizations also seek for job security and wage increase, we need to understand both political dimension and economic dimension of union activities in media industry. While state's control over media has been diminished in the late 1900s, competition in media industry has been intensified. As small number of media corporations monopolizes the media market, the ecology of media has been completely transformed. Unions in media industry should respond to the change of the media ecology and should build solidarity among media workers at the same time. The achievement of the public nature of media as a part of democratization and building union federation of media industry as a response to the marketization of media still remain as an epochal task for media unions. Like the case of "Hope Bus" in the strike in Hanjin Heavy Industrial Corporation, solidarity between citizens and striking workers should be strengthened.

• Korean Journal of Labor Studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.139-176
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• 2011

Non-regular workers came to the fore while working class formation was in retreat along with the democratic labor movement of regular workers. The formation of principal agents, however, is yet to occur. Then, why non-regular workers' struggles could not yield a consequence in that regard? What kind of factors are to determine the outcome of the struggles and how do they do it? It is the aim of this study to answer those questions. In contrast with regular workers' struggles, non-regular workers' struggles tend to break out in response to capitalist offensives, rely on atypical and, often, extreme measures of struggle rather than strike in the form of work stoppage, drag out for too long, and appeal for social solidarity outside when the solidarity of regular workers is not available. Non-regular workers' struggles tend to end up with failure rather than success, and with weakening rather than strengthening of their organizational strength. So as to overcome the tendency to fail, non-regular workers' struggles need regular workers' solidarity in addition to their own strong mobilization power, while social solidarity or positional power could substitute for regular workers' solidarity in some cases. So as to build up their organizational strength, non-regular workers' struggles should win victories in the struggles, while a victory could turn into a trap in the case of conversion. Both regular workers' solidarity and the internal integration of the struggles are two foremost important factors in achieving the victory of struggles and the building-up of organizational strength. Those who have got involved in struggles are from the best organized sector among all the non-regular workers. As they have gone through weakening of organizational strength, it becomes more difficult for non-regular workers to form principal agents. Without non-regular workers' struggles, however, the capitalist offensives must have carried the day. In that sense, non-regular workers' struggles did a role in at least detaining capitalist offensives, if not stopping them. The practical implication of non-regular workers' struggles is that, if non-regular workers redefine the ultimate goal of their struggles as the formation of their principal agents for working class formation, it would be a strategically rational choice to identify the strategic objective of struggles with the maintaining and strengthening of their organizational strength rather than the achievement of their immediate demands.

• Korean Journal of Labor Studies
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.143-178
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• 2018

This study is aimed at empirically examining the Korean unionists' solidarity using the survey of 476 full-time workers employed at the unionized workplace. It also questions the determinants affecting the unionist' willingness to be united with the contingent workers. The Korean unionism has faced the biggest challenge, that is, the crisis-in-worker solidarity. Although prior literature has noted the crisis in Korean unionism, it lacks a solid investigation of individual workers' perception of solidarity which may play a key role in building up worker-solidarity in the union movement. This study first examines the three sources of solidarity allowing for the historical and theoretical approach to the modern solidarity; economic interests, worker-identification and empathy, which provide an emprical framework for this study. The empirical evidences shows dynamic aspects as of how the full-timers perceive solidarity with the non-regular workers in the three terms of solidarity. First, full-time unionists share rare willingness to be united with contingent workers in terms of economic solidarity. In addition, the KCTU (Korean Confederation of Trade Unions) with social reformative orientation has little influence on increasing their member's orientation towards solidarity. Second, it is found that full-time unionists have more willingness to identify themselves with the non-regular workers as a member of the labor class. The KTCU is also positively associated with their member's will of identification with contingent workers. Third, the unionists, however, show little empathy toward non-regular workers, which is contrast to the willingness to worker identification. No causality is also found between the KTCU and their members' empathy for the others.

• 한국사회정책
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2016

This study evaluates the strategic capacity of Korean labor union movement by examining policy alternatives and strategic steps that the Federation of Korean Trade Unions and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions have shown in response to Park Geun-Hye government's labor market structuring policies. While the government-led labor reform was carried out as intended, organized labor has not simply failed to achieve progressive labor reforms to enhance employment security, but also to exert their strategic capacity effectively for preventing Park's labor market flexibilization policies. The two national centers have not been able to exert their strategic capacity (such as intermediating, framing, articulating, learning) for mobilizing the resources of internal solidarity, network embeddedness, narrative discourse, and organizational infrastructure. In particular, the formation and diffusion of public discourse is a significant part of strategic capacity of labor unions dealing with the labor politics of labor market restructuring, since organized labor, which is under the unfavorable constraints of limited movement resources and power imbalance with the business circle, needs to mobilize massive support and participation from union members and civil society organizations. In this light, it becomes of more importance for labor union movement to exert their strategic capacity toward internal solidarity and network embeddedness in the stage of labor market reforms. Under the recent stage of labor reforms, however, the labor unions has not harnessed their movement resources effectively, but undertaken their protest in a traditional manner, thereby losing its public efficacy from inside and outside. Moreover, it is necessary to build and activate the network of organic solidarity among organized labor, civil society organizations and progressive political parties, in order to cope with the pro-business coalition of power elites for accomplishing pro-labor reforms.

• Korean Journal of Labor Studies
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.95-136
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• 2018

As the number of precariats grows, their poor labor rights and working conditions are becoming issues of major concern all over the world but how to represent their interests is still controversial. Basically, the union is the institutional mechanism for representing the labor rights. However, it is difficult for workplaceand enterprise-based unions to fully represent the labor rights of precarious workers. Recently, so-called community unions have emerged in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan as independent organizations representing the rights of non-standard workers. Community unions refer to labor unions which organize precarious workers across firms at the regional level. They are known to be suitable for covering the unemployed, job seekers, indirect employment workers, short-term contract workers, and small-firm workers. In South Korea, since the financial crisis in 1997, a dramatic increase in the number of precariats leads to emergence of new types of trade unions such as the Youth Community Union, the Arbeit Workers' Union, the Artist Social Union and the Korea Musician's Union. They have engaged in various activities to guarantee the labor rights of precariats. Recently, researchers have also tried to identify defining characteristics of these new forms of unionism. To expand research on trade unionism in South Korea, this study compares two different types of community unions: the Youth Community Union and the Arbeit Workers' Union. We believe that this attempt can contribute to the research on the alternative labor movement. For this purpose, this study starts with theoretical discussions on community unions, and compares the Youth Community Union with the Arbeit Workers' Union based on the five characteristics of community unionism: membership and organization structure, the recognition struggle, the type or scope of interest, solidarity with other civic organizations, and the repertoire of resistance strategies. Based on this comparative analysis, this study seeks to foresee the possibility of how community unionism will develop in South Korean in the future.

• International Area Studies Review
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.221-251
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• 2018

Two-tier wage systems mean the dual wage systems that the new wage system require the new future employees to get much lower wage level, compared to the level of wages for existing employees under the existing wage system. While it allows employers to benefit from low-cost advantages, the two-tier wage systems is definitely a type of wage discrimination by the collusion between management and trade unions in that it forces the new future employee to accept the low wages. Also it reflects extreme collectivism which old union members try to keep having their jobs and wages at the sacrifice of future members' wages. The two-tier wage systems had been introduced by airplane industry in 1980s and introduced again in Big Three auto companies in 2007. The purpose of this paper is to examine the history, contents, and details of two-tier wage system in the United States and to think of the possibility of recurrence of the systems in the context of Korean auto industry in the near future. The tentative findings from this paper implies that the two-tier wage systems will likely happen in Korean auto industry because the collusion between trade unions and management are found easily and the degree of extreme collectivism favored by the old permanent union members is seriously high. It is time for trade unions to go back to their original ideals and purposes and to revitalize solidarity among workers.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.75-112
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• 2006

We found following evidences from our empirical analysis with the Workplace Panel Survey data of the Korea Labor Institute with reference to 'discord hypothesis' which insists that employee participatory high performance work practices would strengthen not only an enterprise focus in labor-management relations but also the enterprise unionism in the labor union system or collective bargaining structures, so they would probably come into conflict with the superenterprise-oriented industrial solidarity spirit in labor unionism. First, even though there are significant positive management performance effects of high performance work practices, especially in case of mining and manufacturing industries, the positive performance effects of employee participatory work practices such as job rotation ratio of workers and 6-sigma activities were much strengthened relatively in case of non-unionized establishments. Second, the superenterprise-oriented collective bargaining system is also found to give very strong and statistically significant negative performance effects to the introduction and implementation of work teams and performance-related payment systems such as profit sharing, group incentive pay system and so on. Although there are some careful reservations in interpreting the results of our analysis because of data insufficiency, they may have important implications that the industrial labor unionism or the superenterprise-oriented collective bargaining practices exercise the bargaining power to make individual firms be negative or feel it nearly impossible to introduce the employee participatory work practices which can be very favorable to improving those management performance.

• Korean Journal of Labor Studies
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.105-137
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• 2013

This paper proposes to examine the relationship between the two trade unions of Hyundai Motor Company (HMC) - those of the regular workers and of the in-house subcontract workers - around the issue of converting irregular workers to regular ones, which has been a social issue for a long time, and, furthermore, to find a desirable solution. The politics of the in-house subcontracting rotate around three axes: the conflictive collusion between the company and the regular workers'union regarding the internal labor market; the exclusion and resistance between the company and the subcontract workers'union; and the solidaristic conflict relationship between the two unions. After the final decree by the supreme court in 2012 the conflict and collusion/solidarity relationship of the three social actors have been amplified in scale - the continuous limping of the special bargaining between the company and the unions, the intensified conflict between the company and the subcontract workers'union, and the crisis of the collusion between the branches of the two unions are all evidence of this. A clue to the solution to the issues of in-house subcontracting in HMC can be found through reestablishment of the relationship among the three actors. In order to solve the in-house subcontracting issues in HMC, phased and lawful switching from irregular to regular positions, improvement of working conditions for the irregular workers, integration of the two unions (realization of 'one company one union'), and negotiated flexibility in the internal labor market will be required. Also to be considered are installation of a special committee for the issue, and utilization of external consultants. The result would be the possibility for the corporate labor market of HMC to be composed of regular workers, legal contract workers and directly-employed contract workers, which could be realized through bilateral relations of 'the labor and management conflict partnership'.