Content area
Abstract
Since the early 1990s, labor politics in Korea have undergone major changes. Organized labor, once strong enough to challenge the state and capital, is on the defensive. Cooperative labor relations are pervading large manufacturing firms which have been the core of the hard-line labor movement. The main thrust of this dissertation is to provide an explanation of these developments and, through this project, to develop an analytic framework for studying changes of labor relations.
The dominant trend in the study of Korean labor relations is the heavy emphasis on the state and its labor policy, often suggested as the main factor behind the change in labor relations. This and other domestic factors, however, cannot explain the decline of organized labor and the cooperative tendency in current Korean labor movement which occurred in a favorable political and economic environment. Moreover, the fact that the decline of unions and transformation of industrial relations system are global phenomena suggests that some general force is behind the current development in Korean labor relations.
As a corrective to a domestic-oriented perspective, this dissertation presents an institutional approach to labor relations, which views labor relations as an institutional arrangement supporting an accumulation regime and thus being affected by a change in this regime. The dissertation argues that current developments in the world economy are important in understanding the current changes in Korean labor relations. The structural change in capitalism which conditions the evolution of the world economy necessitates a new development strategy in Korea and consequently undermines the efficiency of labor relations which have supported the existing development strategy. This dissertation examines how the new world economy affects the state, capital and labor and consequently the existing labor relations at both the national and the firm level. The dissertation argues that the current difficulty of organized labor in Korea is attributable to well-defined strategies in labor relations by the competitiveness-oriented state and capital and to the lack of an effective response by labor, which instead dwells on distributional issues.
