Some Reviews of Books on Korea, Part 3: The Labor Movement

Back in part one, I mentioned that there is still no single volume, definitive guide to Korean sociology, and so to get a good overall picture there seemed to be no alternative but to purchase a lot of books on more specialized aspects of Korean society such as marriage, developmentalism, education, gender studies, consumerism, ethnic nationalism, democratization, social welfare…and so forth instead, something like at least 15-20 books in the end. Of course, only complete Korea studies geeks like myself would ever contemplate doing so, but then ever since I started reducing the number of pictures of Korean women in bikinis on the blog, complete Korea studies geeks are increasingly the only people who still read it. Naturally, I would like to focus on things that keep both all of my remaining readers happy.

How to do that? First, to reward those who’ve read this far, let me point out that rather than pasting them up here, if you’re so inclined you can find pictures of Korean women to your heart’s content all by yourself here and here (both SFW, and a big note of appreciation to Lost Nomad for the latter). Second, my original intention was to gather all those 15 books or so I mention into a big pile on my desk and review all of them in this post, but it’s proved a much bigger task than I thought, and sorry, but I can’t do it before I go on vacation next week. If you can’t stand the nail-biting tension until mid-January, you can see the books I’m going to talk about (amongst others) in advance by clicking here, but if you do may I highly recommend downloading Razor while you’re browsing, definitely worth the wait.

Having said all that, just look at what I picked up in Kyobo:

Korean Society: Civil society, democracy and the state 2nd. ed. (2007) edited by Charles K. Armstrong

This isn’t a general guide to Korean sociology, it’s about the development of Korean civil society, much drier and more specialized, chapters examining pressing Korean sociological issues like this somewhat lacking. Actually you may have seen this book yourself years ago, which is why I’ve put up a picture of the first edition to jog people’s memories, but were put off by the price: I think I first saw this in hardcover in Kyobo maybe in 2004, mine for…88,000 or even 120,000 won or so? Something outrageous like that. Naturally then, I was pretty pleased to find a revised paperback edition for a mere 44,230 won, but even that was still the cost of a night’s drinking, and given all the other books in my backpack already then buying it justifiably aroused the ire of my wife later. But actually before I saw it I’d already chosen to buy this book:

The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation: Dynamic Labour Politics in South Korea (2002) by Sun Hak Tae

And once I’d decided to buy that, just had to buy Korean Society as a…well…general overview of the subject to guide me through it. Sure, that may well sound akin to buying some nice, light reading like Lenin’s Imperialism as a brief guide to Marx’s Das Kapital, but let me explain.

After coming from the Royal Asiatic Society earlier, full of ancient and obscure books about Korea, I was very surprised to find still ancient and obscure but bigger, better and cheaper books at the otherwise modern Kyobo store. Two were published in the mid-1990s and provided a wealth of data about things like women’s workforce participation rates and other social indicators back then, and another literally gave a day by day account of absolutely everything that happened during the Asian Financial Crisis and the restructuring afterwards. All three would have been invaluable resources, at least for me, but I simply wouldn’t have been able to physically carry them back to Busan (hmmm, maybe I should see if I can order them before you all rush out and buy them). I was thinking pretty much the same about The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation, a very dry, weighty 585 page tome, and oh-so-attractively presented in the minimalist binding and typeface that minor university presses lavish on works based on their students’ theses, of which they maybe expect to sell five tops. But I flicked through it, and after reading in the introduction that the author intended to apply the theoretical model outlined in this next book below to the case of Korea, would have brought it home to Busan even if it meant leaving my wife and daughter behind, for it’s that good.

Capitalist Development and Democracy (1992), by Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephensand John D. Stephens

Primarily because of a charismatic ex-Sandanista/lecturer of mine, before I came to Korea I’d actually studied Latin America just as much if not more than East Asia, and was planning to go to Nicaragua eventually; lacking enough machismoto handle the pelvic thrusts in the Tango and any Che-Guevara’s hair however, Korea was probably the right move in the end. At university about a year earlier, I’d been studying Latin American politics for most of my time there, and of course knew a lot but all too often it had felt like learning history at school, in this case mere memorization of different countries’ political histories, and I often despaired of ever making connections between events and seeing trends, let alone being paid in the future to make predictions based on my knowledge. But then I read the book above, the bulk of which is about democratization, but which uses the experiences of all Latin America countries over the past 150 years as case studies to test their theoretical model. And once I read it, I had a wonderful moment where everything I’d learnt in the last 2-3 whole years of study of the region, which had often felt as effective as banging my head against a brick wall, suddenly all became clear in less than an hour.

To the geeks reading, I’m sure you know what I mean, because after somehow reaching one revelation while we’re students, where so suddenly we understand so many things about the world…we become geeks by continuing to study for the rest of our lives, in quiet desperation to reach another. I’ve only had three more experiences like that, my most recent about Korea naturally, and so it was to flesh out and bring some sense of closure to that that I’d already decided to buy The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation when I realised that it was based heavily on Capitalist Development and Democracy, my previous highly-cherished muse. After that, well, I would have paid 60,000 more than the 20,000 won I did pay for it.

Unfortunately, after stringing you along like that, I’m going to have to break your hearts, because I can’t do justice to it in the remaining space in this post, but I’ll do my best to give you a brief introduction. First, if you haven’t read my post Manufacturing, Childcare and Salarymen: Why Korea is such a fascinating place to study yet, please do so, because I’m very proud of it these subjects are intimately linked. Assuming that you have then, let me begin by quoting from Chapter 4 of Korean Society by Hagen Koo, entitled Engendering civil society: The role of the labor movement (pp. 73-94):

…this chapter takes issue with privileging the role of the middle classes in the making of South Korean democracy and civil society. Against this prevailing assumption, I argue that South Korean democracy and civil society did not occur as the “natural” outcome of economic growth and the expansion of the middle class, but as a consequence of persistent struggles by students, intellectuals, and workers against successive authoritarian regimes….Those who stress the conflictual aspect of South Korea’s transition to democracy…tend to give prominence to the role of students and dissident intellectuals. The aim of my chapter is, however, [to show] that spirited working-class struggles…played a critical role in bringing about both democratic transition and the expansion of civil society. This is not to argue that the working class alone played such a role. Rather, it was the close interaction between the grassroots labor movement and the student-led democracy movement that enhanced the power of social movements against the authoritarian state….And it is through involvement in labor struggles, directly or indirectly, that many students and intellectuals gained critical consciousness and later became leaders of the civil society movement. Those who are actively involved in the post-1987 citizens’ movements do not represent ordinary middle-class citizens, but those who had experienced the political and social movements of the pre-1987 period. (pp.73-74) (italics added)

Admittedly, in itself it is hardly a great revelation that members of the ”386 Generation“ of today were strongly influenced by events in their twenties, but its always good to remind ourselves of the volatility of life in Korea back in the mid to late-1980s. And regardless of what you may think of Roh Moo-hyun’s political ineptitude, for instance, he was a pretty fine human-rights lawyer back then, and you can often see traces of his then necessary confrontational style and populism in his political outbursts today. Seeing as how I’ve heard from psychologists that the vast majority of people’s personalities are set by the time they’re 30, and that certainly seems true of myself, then I would be very surprised if the democratization struggles hadn’t formed the prism through which the 386 Generation view events today.

And just to be clear, the “386 Generation” is a new term, and may just refer to politicians in the Roo Moo-hyun Administration, so Koo is arguing that the then young members of all groups involved in the democratization movement, many now presumably higher up in the hierarchies of their respective organizations, all retain this confrontational notion of politics today. Student groups now have different members of course, but for corporatist reasons many didn’t disband as soon as Roh Tae-woo declared the first free presidential elections in 1987, but instead morphed into the forerunners of the environmentalist, feminist and anti-American student groups of Korea today.

But having said all that, remember that that was 20 years ago, and so despite that strong influence Korean politics should not still be like that today. Of course, Korea is not quite the military regime it was in 1987, indeed riot police are no longer always the bad guys, but not only do frequent and sometimes violent strikes and demonstrations seem to be the norm (for an excellent blog on that, try TwoKoreas), but Korea has by no means fully democratized even in ”soft” areas like freedom of expression yet (see here too for a notorious recent libel case). Overall, it seems to have moved little beyond the ”procedural” democracy of mere elections and votes, and it is only on this procedural level that Korean politics appears like the mundane multiparty systems in readers’ home countries. This was starkly shown to me personally when I turned on the TV on election night back in 2002, and all I could see were rows and rows of old men in suits at the various party headquarters. In contrast, election nights on TV back in New Zealand brought throngs of young people and grannies, with the odd politician standing out only because he or she was the only wearing a suit (with the exception of the rabidly right-wing ACT party). But next Wednesday, I guarantee you that with the exception of Park Geun-hye, and maybe some secretaries pouring the coffee, it will be difficult for you to even find a woman in the background. Sure, much the same can be said about US politics, but rather than detracting from my point, actually that confirms it all the more: why is Korean politics so polarized now, when a relative equality of income distribution was so crucial to its miracle development?

Of course, like I said in my earlier post, throwing millions of salarymen onto the streets, wiping out their savings, and having no social welfare net to speak of would have any self-respecting former student-protester reaching for the Molotov cocktails, and indeed the number and violence of strikes, demonstrations, and protests have risen sharply since the Asian Financial Crisis. Korea going from having the highest numbers of salarymen in the OECD (and world) in 1997 to having the highest number of irregular, short-term, poorly legally-protected workers in the OECD by 2007 certainly didn’t help either. But the return to violence was not immediate, and it was not natural, because although the late-1980s and early-1990s were even more turbulent than before democracy was restored, by the mid-1990s “street” politics had died down to a level that observers today would find astonishing, and what’s more the lighters and barricades had been put away. Although there was a pre-crisis nation-wide series of strikes over new labor laws in the winter of 1996-1997 for instance, rather than a return to the bad old days, Hagen Koo says:

Whereas in previous periods, industrial workers occupied a marginal place in the civil society, through [these] [they] have emerged as a major champion for the rest of society. Another Korean labor analyst argues, “by exercising its national leadership over other popular forces in democratic struggles, the Korean working class for the first time went beyond the expression of narrow ‘corporate’ interests and began to function as a kind of ‘hegemonic’ class, whose class interests were perceived as representing the interests of the people in general.” (p. 85)

While it sounds prosaic in writing, my ‘revelation’ was beginning in beginning to see through the confusion of events and begin to get a grasp of post-crisis politics in Korea, not just blandly attributing everything and anything to the crisis anymore. In a nutshell, because the details is what I bought the books for, in the immediate post-crisis period, the government, management and labor formed a “Tripartite Council” (경제사회발전노사정위원회) to try to come to some arrangements to deal with the crisis…and here the sources begin disagreeing. Koo, for instance, thinks that it was significant that labor was considered an equal on par with the former, whereas most I’ve read say that it was very much a junior partner. And after it’s Tripartite Accord was signed on February 6 1998, Koo claims that most workers were very unhappy with the redundancy provisions their representatives had agreed to, whereas previously I’d heard that the reason for this resentment was more because the Government and Management reneged on some of the compensating concessions that they’d agreed to.

Regardless of which version is correct, the labor movement split up and has been involved in internecine fighting thereafter, producing a morass of acronyms like the FKTU, KCTU, KCLW, KFTU, CCEJ, CUPEJ, KWAU and the NFNDM (for starters) that I’ll have no choice but to learn if I want to be regarded as a serious commentator on Korean politics…but which easily disguise the forest for the trees, for recall that Koo said that before the crisis, the labor movement had come to be seen as a representative force for many Korean workers. Once they clearly couldn’t get their act together, then who did ordinary people have left to represent them? The old men in suits pressing the flesh on TV?

Not only have many Koreans increasingly been feeling effectively disenfranchised over the last decade then, but their increasingly insecure jobs and incomes have meant that there’s been less they can do about it. Moreover, while all this has been occurring, the Department of Social Welfare deliberately took a very conservative definition of poverty and unemployment in order to curtail the number of claims on the already very meagre social welfare funds available. Consequently, while Korea’s economic indicators have ostensibly recovered, the domestic economy is stagnant, the middle-class has shrunk, and precisely at the moment when Korea must make radical changes to its composition of industries, education system, and acceptance of working mothers and immigration…of course there is no unified ”Korea” anymore, and all too many Koreans feel they have already borne the brunt of what has effectively been a lost decade. Then no wonder people resort to violent protests, demonstrations, and netizen-led democracy: nothing else seems to work, and finally, the way stubborn, unreasonable way Koreans typically resolve conflicts makes a lot of sense to me.

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