From Solidarity to Fragmentation: Explaining Dualism and Inequality at the Shipyard of Hyundai Heavy Industries

• In Event: 4323 - Section on Labor and Labor Movement Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Unions and Work in an International Context

Abstract

Previous studies on labor relations in the South Korean shipbuilding industry have emphasized that employers and managers fostered cooperation with manual workers, achieving industrial peace. What these scholars have often neglected to note is the extraordinary growth of lower-paid non-regular workers and the wage inequality between regular and non-regular workers. Given that the large-scale shipyards have historically been an epicenter of labor unrest and a stronghold of democratic labor unions in South Korea, both the enduring dualism and the relative lack of solidarity between regular and non-regular workers are especially puzzling. Through an in-depth case study of the Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI), one of the world’s largest ship manufacturers as well as a birthplace of militant labor unionism in South Korea, this article develops a relational account of dualism and inequality in the workplace. The author maintains that employers at HHI, in an attempt to reduce labor costs and improve export competitiveness, installed and perpetuated the dualism and inequality beginning in the early 1990s. The author also highlights the changing pattern of interaction between regular and non-regular workers from solidarity to fragmentation which contributed to increasing the workforce dualism and wage inequality at HHI. By investigating the dynamic interactions between regular/formal and non-regular/informal workers as well as the changing labor-capital relations, this article can enhance our understanding of how relational processes of exploitation, opportunity hoarding, and claim-making played key roles in strengthening or weakening the dualism and inequality in the workplace.

Author

• Minhyoung Kang, Johns Hopkins University