This article explores the extensive casualization of work and its impact on the working life of the people in South Korea after the financial crisis in 1997. A drastic increase in precarious workers ...was an immediate consequence of the neoliberal economic reform implemented by the new democratic government, including the enhancement of flexibility in the labor market and the restructuring of the financial market, under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund. Precarious work in South Korea has dramatically increased in the past decade, including both nonregular workers and precarious self-employment in the formal sector. Above all, proliferation of new types of nonregular employment in the 2000s has witnessed the significant transformation of the world of work in South Korea, deepening inequality and poverty. The extremely liberalized labor market tends to result in the fierce labor struggle of nonregular workers, not entitled to be members of unions, replacing the labor movement of regular workers’ labor unions.
This paper addresses the transformation of work and employment in the period of post-COVID-19 in South Korea. The COVD-19 pandemic displays the failure of the market in managing the public health ...crisis and the crisis of neoliberal globalization, demanding massive state intervention to reproduce the stability of the social system. COVID-19 disrupted global production networks and global supply chains, generating economic disorder and mass unemployment. It also revealed the segmented labour market based on firm size, gender, employment status, and inadequate social protection. The COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, reveals problems that are embedded in the Korean economy, though at the same time provides an opportunity to discuss alternatives to the neoliberal economy. In particular, discourses on universal basic income and universal unemployment insurance have gained popularity as COVID-19 has disrupted mass' livelihood through promoting precarious work and expanding the population unprotected by labour laws and the social security system.
Precarious work: A global perspective Shin, Kwang‐Yeong; Kalleberg, Arne L.; Hewison, Kevin
Sociology compass,
December 2023, 2023-12-00, 20231201, Letnik:
17, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Precarious work is universal, though its forms and consequences vary across countries due to institutional, cultural, and historical differences. This article reviews recent research on precarious ...work from a global perspective, emphasizing the comparative and interdisciplinary research needed for a comprehensive understanding of the structural transformations in contemporary capitalism that promote precarious work. The article has three foci. First, research that details the diverse forms of precarious work, which have become increasingly heterogeneous as national labor markets have been interwoven with global production networks. Second, research on precarious work that emphasizes its disparate impacts for women, youth, the elderly, racial and ethnic minority groups, and migrants, revealing an articulation of precarity and social cleavages. Third, research on the politics associated with precarious work and how some precarious workers have successfully organized and mobilized their interests, such as by unionizing and becoming involved in electoral politics. Still, questions remain regarding precarious work: how precarious workers differ from regular workers in representing their interests and demands and whether precarious workers are a new, independent social class or remain part of a changing working class. Finally, topics for future research on the global dimensions of precarious work are discussed.
Precarious Asia Kalleberg, Arne L; Hewison, Kevin; Shin, Kwang-Yeong
12/2021
eBook
Precarious Asia assesses the role of global and
domestic factors in shaping precarious work and its outcomes in
Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia as they represent a range of
Asian political ...democracies and capitalist economies: Japan and
South Korea are now developed and mature economies, while Indonesia
remains a lower-middle income country.
With their established backgrounds in Asian studies, comparative
political economy, social stratification and inequality, and the
sociology of work, the authors yield compelling insights into the
extent and consequences of precarious work, examining the dynamics
underlying its rise. By linking macrostructural policies to both
the mesostructure of labor relations and the microstructure of
outcomes experienced by individual workers, they reveal the
interplay of forces that generate precarious work, and in doing so,
synthesize historical and institutional analyses with the political
economy of capitalism and class relations. This book reveals how
precarious work ultimately contributes to increasingly high levels
of inequality and condemns segments of the population to chronic
poverty and many more to livelihood and income vulnerability.
This paper attempts to provide a new approach to social inequality, focusing on income and wealth inequality and the relationship between income inequality and wealth inequality. With an analysis of ...the data linking survey data with administrative data in South Korea, this paper reports that wealth, employment status, family size, and education are significant contributors to income inequality. However, income and loans are the two most significant factors contributing to wealth inequality. Income derived from economic activity and loans based on the leverage in the financial market have exacerbated wealth inequality as higher income groups tend to utilize more loans in the financialized economy, widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Wealth inequality has different dynamics from income inequality, mediated through leverage in South Korea.
This paper explores how the return to power by the authoritarian conservative Grand National Party after a decade of liberal government was possible, drawing attention to the mode of democratic ...transition and its impact on democratic consolidation, and to the role of civil society in South Korea. It examines how the democratic transition by pact failed to eliminate the legacies of authoritarianism within the state and civil society and contributed to the maintenance of authoritarian civic organisations established by the military regime. Whilst liberal democratic parties took power in the midst of the East Asian financial crisis, they ultimately undermined their own social bases by carrying out neoliberal economic reforms in order to tackle the crisis. The rise of conservative civil society in the 2000s formed the social base upon which the Grand National Party was able to regain state power through a significant shift in voters' party preference. Its reorganisation of the conservative civic organisations played a key role in mobilising frustrated voters to support it in 2007. The Korean experience of democratisation demonstrates that democratic transition is not only a political process but also a social and economic process, revealing that in Korea civil society has been far from democratic.
This paper explores the impact of globalisation on the working class in South Korea. Globalisation in South Korea has been distinctive in that it has taken place during the transition to democracy. ...While democratisation has empowered workers to organise, globalisation has undermined the strength of the organised workers, segmenting regular workers from contingent workers. The abrupt neo-liberal economic reforms that followed the financial crisis of 1997-98 totally transformed the structure of the labour market, generating massive numbers of contingent workers who are vulnerable to economic insecurity and social risks. Under the system of company unions, the militant economic unionism that developed among unions in big corporations demonstrated its limitations in promoting the interests of contingent workers. As the struggles of contingent workers have expanded, social movement unionism, which unifies labour issues and social issues, has emerged as an alternative to militant economic unionism of unions composed of regular workers. This movement could provide a glimpse of a possible new future for the union movement in other Asian countries that have experienced similar economic and political changes.
This article deals with the historical trajectory of anti-communism in South Korea since 1945. Anti-communism has been working as a powerful ideological and institutional constraint to suppress ...political opposition to authoritarian regimes and to hinder development of critical thoughts in South Korea. However, the demise of East European socialist countries and globalization has transformed the nature of anti-communism, by equating non-market ideologies with communism. Even though there have been political and economic change in the 21
st
century, anti-communism has still played an important role in constraining policy development as well as political discourse.
PDF
