• 한국사회정책
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.47-76
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• 2013

The discussion of "new risks" in the field of social policy started to gain attention in the late 1990s and it is commonly argued that new risks are provoked by deindustrialization and/or globalization being more concentrated among the young, women and low skilled individuals. This study commences its inquiry with a conceptualization of labour market risk in an attempt to critically rethink the argument of new risk. A reevaluation of the concept is followed by an empirical investigation on the different types of risks and their changes by different degree. Eight-teen countries are selected in order to provide a comparative account to understand new risk. These are comparatively analyzed using the fuzzy-set ideal type approach to discover different types of social risks and to measure degrees of changes in relation to social risk. In sum, this paper aims to answer: what is new risk? and how do the characteristic of labour market risks differ in different post-industrial countries? The findings suggest that the types of risk are diverse and the speed or the directions of shift are also diverse.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.18-37
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• 2024

This study examines migrant workers' occupational health and safety issues through a case study of the UK construction industry, focusing on structural vulnerabilities. Migrant workers are at the bottom of the hierarchically fragmented labour market, performing outsourced hazardous work. Structural vulnerability focuses on the social structures that create hierarchies and increase risk in the workplace, rather than on individual responsibility or 'cultural' differences of migrant workers. The study considers the structural factors that perpetuate the migrantisation of risk in the UK construction industry, focusing on the structural necessity of low-wage migrant labour, precarious employment and the legal status of migrant workers, and discusses how these three factors interact to increase migrant workers' vulnerability to health and safety. The migrantisation of risk is not only a matter of occupational health and safety or universal workers' compensation, but also of the intertwining of labour migration policies with employment structures that rely on low-wage, low-skilled labour. This calls for proactive measures to address structural risks that go beyond passive declaratory policies that do not exclude migrant workers from education, training or legal systems.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-39
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• 2006

This paper documents the increase in earnings variability (or earnings risk) during the 1990s in Korea, and investigates whether it can be accounted for by capital market opening. The variances of transitory and permanent innovations in earnings are estimated from repeated cross-section data using a simple econometric framework. The increasing time-series pattern of earnings risk among men follows the increased foreign capital presence reasonably well, but the supporting cross-sectional evidence for a causal relationship between the two is weak. However, foreign direct investment (FDI) is found to have had some non-neutral effects on workers of varying skills in such a way that transitory earnings risk of less-skilled workers relatively increased with FDI. To the extent that transitory innovations are not fully insured, this widening effect of FDI on earnings risk gap may have contributed to widening welfare gap between skilled and unskilled workers in Korea, at least in terms of "risks."

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.207-230
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• 2001

This paper uses the Korean Labor Panel data to investigate changes in the employment types of male workers following their job changes with the classification of workers into three categories: regular wage workers, non-regular wage workers, and self-employed workers. It also estimates a competing-risks hazard model to analyze the determinants of employment types of workers. The results show that the type of employment of a worker at an immediate previous job has a critical importance in determining his employment type at a new job and that the types of employment at jobs other than the immediate previous job also play some role in determining the type of employment at a new job, although their impact declines as the number of intervening jobs increases. A job loser, who worked as a non-regular worker at his immediate previous job, for example, is considerably less likely to find a regular job, but more likely to get reemployed at another non-regular job than one who worked as a regular worker at his immediate previous job. Similarly, a worker who quit self-employment is much less likely to find a regular job but more likely to restart his own business than one who worked as a regular worker at his immediate previous job. These findings suggest that it is not easy at all for a worker who worked as either a non-regular worker or self-employed worker to become a regular worker, although it might be premature to assert that non-regular jobs or self-employed jobs are dead-end jobs. Another interesting finding of this analysis is that a high unemployment rate lowers a probability of reemployment at either regular jobs or self-employed jobs, but raises a non-regular job reemployment probability, which strongly implies that as labor market conditions become adverse to workers the proportion of non-regular employment can rise rapidly.