Workers’ Movements in Decline or Renewal? Dynamics of Labor Unrest in South Korea, 1998-2013

• In Event: 157 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Paper Session. Open Topic on Labor and Labor Movements

Abstract

The existing literature reveals disagreement about whether the Korean labor movement has been strengthened or weakened since the neoliberal turn of the late 1990s, and in particular, on the relative importance of the role played by regular (formal) and non-regular (informal/casual) workers. To better understand the rise and decline of worker protest in post-1997 Korea, this paper focuses on two forms of labor unrest: defensive mobilization by already-organized regular workers (Polanyi-type) and offensive mobilization by newly-organized non-regular workers (Marx-type). Given that the Korean strike statistics underestimate the frequency of non-regular worker protests and fail to scrutinize the demand of workers, the author constructed an original protest event dataset based on newspaper reports, disaggregating them into offensive and defensive, and regular and non-regular worker protests. This paper proposes a time-series regression model to explain whether threat, casualization, hardship, and worker power has tended to drive or suppress offensive and defensive labor protests in the period from 1998 to the present. Model estimates indicate that regular worker-led, defensive resistance is related to employer threat and economic hardship, while labor casualization has no direct influence on the non-regular workers’ offensive protest. These results help us explain why there have been recurrent waves of Polanyi-type labor unrest, why regular worker movements for union centralization and revitalization do not go hand-and-hand with Marx-type labor unrest, and more importantly, why the solidarity between formal and informal workers has not been well-developed in the Korean labor movement.

Author

• Minhyoung Kang, Johns Hopkins University