Significance of and Developments after the 1987 Korean Labor Uprising

The last entry on Hagen Koo's article Labor Movement in Korea Losing Steam (Insight into Korea, Herald Media 2007).

Koo argued that one of the most important significance of the 1987 labor uprising was that it brought new actors into the South Korean labor movement.

The center of labor conflicts shifted from small-scale, light manufacturing sectors to heavy chemical industrial centers.

All of a sudden, the semi-skilled male workers in heavy and chemical industries emerged as the main actors of the South Korean labor movement, pushing aside and marginalizing women workers who had played an active role in the grassroots union movement earlier on.

New and powerful unions were also established at large manufacturing firms, and many white-collar unions were also set up in the service sector.

"The new unionism thus emerged represented a militant unionism with a strong antipathy and mistrust toward management and the government. This was undoubtedly the products of the extremely repressive labor regime during the authoritarian period of rapid industrialization."

This new unionism and organized labor also emerged as a major social force for democratic reform and social justice.

But more significantly, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, production workers at conglomerates obtained hefty wage hikes and increased welfare compensation.

Unions also became more democratized, and the previously government-controlled Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU, pictured, logo) was revamped to become a genuinely independent and representative union.

Koo noted that another significant development was the formation of an alternative radical national center, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 1995, comprising many powerful unions in the automobile, shipbuilding, health care, and telecommunications industries.

Yet another significant development was the globalization of the South Korean economy.

"If democratization opened the political space for the labor movement, globalization functioned to undermine the economic base of the unionism."

Globalization brought new managerial practices aimed at creating a flexible labor force, and indeed, the major focus of labor-management conflicts in the first half of the 1990s was on labor laws concerned with employer rights on utilization of labor and particularly on layoffs of workers.

The conflict resulted in the Kim Young-sam government's "ill-calculated legislative move" to pass controversial labor laws aimed at giving more power to employers to lay off workers, at a pre-dawn National Assembly session on December 26, 1996, with no opposition lawmakers present.

The undemocratic move unsurprisingly triggered off a huge labor response. The newly formed KCTU and the old FKTU coordinated successfully to produce the first large-scale general strike since the Korean War, mobilizing millions of workers over a three-week period in January 1997.

Since the strike was about job security and many people were experiencing job instability, it was fully supported by the public.

"This was one of the rare moments since the 1987 transition when organized labor appeared as a moral force fighting for social justice, democracy and economic interests not only of union members but of all working people in society."

But as Koo noted, "the euphoric moment" did not last long as the Korean economy was hit by a financial crisis a few months later.

To cope with the crisis, the government proposed the setting up of a labor-management-government tripartite body. In February 1998, the Tripartite Commission succeeded in producing a tripartite accord that, among other things, allowed employers to implement redundancy layoffs in cases of business failures.

Although the accord was welcomed as a "historical compromise" by most interested parties, the rank-and-file KCTU members were upset by the outcome and forced the union leadership to resign.

"Subsequently, the KCTU stepped out of the Tripartite Commission, and the bad feelings created at this time continued to haunt the radical leadership and operate as a source of deep mistrust toward the government's effort for labor-capital compromise."