Background to South Korea Labor Unions' Militancy

I would be the first to deride South Korea's militant labor unions. But while I agree that their moves had weakened Korea's competitiveness, I am also sympathetic to the historical background which had turned them militant.

After all, it should be remembered that labor unions in Korea have not always been militant. In the decades following the Korean War from 1950-53, unions had been severely repressed. They turned increasingly militant only in light of Korea's democratization wave in the late 1980s.

As Carter Eckert noted in his article The South Korean Bourgeoisie, (Hagen Koo ed. State and Society in Contemporary Korea, Cornell University, 1993), the new atmosphere of free and aggressive unions "raised the possibility of a transition to a more equal and balanced relationship between capital and labor after more than two decades of labor repression, a change that one might argue was not only politically long overdue, but also economically necessary for further development."

Eckert also explained the reasons why Korean capitalists had been, for want of a better word, brutal (or in Eckert's words, inability to "transcend a short-term economic perspective towards the working class") in their treatment of Korean workers. These include structural constraints such as a lack of natural resources, a limited source of indigenous capital, and a weak technological base.

Eckert also noted that since the colonial period, Korean entrepreneurs had "used every means at their disposal", including the use of the police and hired thugs, to ensure that labor costs had remained as low as possible.

Eckert added: "Such unequivocal support from the state decade after decade strengthened many Korean businessmen in the belief that they could treat their workers as they chose with virtual impunity. Thus by the mid-1980s, as South Korea's top chaebols were moving upward on Fortune's list of the world's richest companies, Korean workers were suffering from what many of them regarded as unfairly low pay and from the longest working day in the industrialized world."

Also playing a role in the oppression of workers was the traditional elitist attitudes. Korea had a long history of "oppressive landlordism" that continued even after the country's liberation from Japan. It also had a less well-known but "statistically significant history of institutionalized slavery" that was officially abolished in 1894, but which seemed to have continued to some extent on an informal, private basis in various parts of the country.

And since many of Korea's capitalists were descended from this traditional land or slave-owning class, they had consciously or unconsciously help created an "authoritarian corporate culture in which workers have been regarded by managers with varying degrees of paternalism or disdain, but rarely, if ever, as equals or even junior partners in a common enterprise."

Even businessmen who had taken a strong personal interest in their workers' welfare were unwilling to acknowledge that workers had any kind of right to make demands on the company.

In an example cited by Eckert, in July 1987, in the aftermath of the first wave of labor unrest that swept through the country, a highly successful small-medium exporter expressed his moral outrage that his workers had gone on strike even though he had always treated them well. He had provided his workers with relatively high wages and bonuses, and "a superior work environment complete with showers and other facilities."

"What he could not understand or accept was that the workers themselves might have found his paternalism, however sincere, inadequate to their needs and, more to the point, that they might have felt that they had a legitimate right to voice their grievances. The only explanation he would accept for the strike was that it had been instigated by radical students posing as workers, that is, that the workers had been duped into striking by sophisticated outside agitators."