As in most other areas, the Park Chung Hee era (Pak Chŏnghŭi) left a mixed legacy in labor policy and labor relations. On the one hand, his labor policy was successful in the sense that labor was effectively mobilized and harnessed to his industrialization program with minimal friction. Given that export-oriented industrialization depended heavily on the low-wage, hard-working, and disciplined labor force, the major objective of Park’s labor policy was to ensure such a favorable labor market for export-led industrial development. Labor supply was well maintained, manpower training was adequately performed, and wages were kept under control. More importantly, the Park government maintained a high level of industrial peace throughout the period of rapid economic growth until the end of the 1970s. Throughout this period, there was not a single occasion when any large-scale labor disturbance hampered export production. South Korea thus offered a very favorable investment climate for foreign capitalists. Both foreign and domestic capital were assured of industrial peace and of consistent state policies about labor issues.
On the other hand, Park’s labor policy may be considered a failure from humanist and societal points of view. It was a highly authoritarian and repressive system. It systematically denied workers the right to organize and defend their interests collectively through representative organizations. Obsessed with economic growth, the Park administration turned a blind eye to the incredible degree of labor exploitation and abuse in the workplace and left no adequate outlets for workers to air their concerns. Thus, the system bred much disaffection and resentment among workers. An historical evaluation of Park Chung Hee’s labor policies, therefore, depends on which side one takes—that of capital, labor, development, or economic justice. It was a good system from the capitalists’ point of view and from the viewpoint of economic growth. But it was a bad situation from the workers’ point of view, and from the human rights’ perspective. Considering this, it would be fair to regard Park’s labor policies as half success and half failure.1
From a long-term perspective, however, I would argue that the Park Chung Hee (Pak Chŏnghŭi) government’s labor policy was largely a failure, and an unfortunate one. It was so, I contend, not simply because it was undemocratic and repressive, but also because it established a system that was effective in the short term but counterproductive and not sustainable in the long run.2 The structure of the control system had broken down by the end of the Park era through internal contradictions and labor resistance. And it left an undesirable legacy for the succeeding labor regimes that plagues today’s industrial relations system.
This chapter examines labor policies and labor relations during the Park Chung Hee era by focusing on the dialectic relationship of mobilization and demobilization of labor. Park’s consistent policy was to mobilize workers economically as an element of production, and demobilize them politically as a possible threat to security and national development. But he did this in a rather crude and shortsighted fashion, relying primarily on security forces, with little regard to developing a mature industrial relations system. The consequence of his narrow developmentalist and security-oriented approach was the growing alienation of workers from the system and the mobilization of workers at the grassroots level in alliance with democratic forces in society. Eventually, both Park himself and the working people had to pay a great price for the crude labor system Park installed during this period. Furthermore, Park’s labor policies bequeathed to succeeding generations a pattern of habits and behaviors—on the part of capital, labor, and the state—which rely too heavily on mistrust, uncompromising confrontations, and violent means of dispute resolution. To a great extent, the highly contentious and mistrustful industrial relations that seem to characterize the South Korean industrial system today is attributable to the pattern established during Park’s developmental decades.
It seems that Park Chung Hee and his associates came to power with no clear vision or ideas about the industrial relations system they planned to develop. Their main concern was to maintain political and social order and to prevent organized labor from becoming a source of political instability or an obstacle to economic development. Most probably, military leaders came to power with a certain degree of arrogance and immaturity with regards to labor, because industrial labor at the time was not a serious power to be reckoned with.3 Park’s leadership might have thought that organized labor could be easily molded into shape with a little manipulation and ideological control.
Although Park Chung Hee’s labor policies are generally described as harsh and oppressive, it is necessary to recognize that his earlier policies were not so authoritarian and restrictive of labor rights. In the 1960s, workers were relatively free to organize themselves, bargain collectively, and engage in collective actions. While Park’s approach to organized labor was heavy handed, during this period he showed no intention to restrict workers’ basic rights of organization and collective activities.4 Park’s policies, however, took a sharp turn at the end of the 1960s and became increasingly authoritarian and repressive during the Yusin period (1972–80). It is thus useful to divide the Park period into two periods: the relatively liberal 1960s and the repressive 1970s.
Laying Down the Framework: The 1960s
One of the first measures which the military junta took after it seized power on May 16, 1961, was to dissolve the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU, Taehan Noryŏn). Immediately after that, the newly created Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) selected some thirty labor representatives and trained them to organize new unions.5 Of them, nine members (the so-called Nine Member Committee) were entrusted with the task of reorganizing the national union. They finished the task swiftly and founded the new Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU or Han’guk Noch’ong) on August 30, 1961. Subsequently, other labor leaders, recommended by the Nine Member Committee, were selected to engage in organizing industrial- and regionallevel unions. The new FKTU was organized along industry lines, and officially sanctioned unions were given exclusive representation rights. Only one union was allowed to represent a given enterprise or a given industry. Legally, these enterprise unions were organized as union shops, although compulsory membership was never enforced or even encouraged in practice.
The overall union structure that came into existence during the Park period thus resembled the state-corporatist model in terms of state sanctioning of unions, exclusive representation rights of official unions, and industrial union structure.6 The real nature of the South Korean union structure, however, was far from a genuine state corporatist model. In the ROK, official unions were neither encouraged, nor allowed, to represent workers. Industrial unions were not given much authority or resources to regulate and represent the interests formed at the local union level. There were few horizontal linkages among local unions within the industry, and virtually all the collective bargaining was conducted at the enterprise-union level. Most of all, the state was basically uninterested in taking organized labor even as a junior partner into its policy-making process.
Nonetheless, the Park leadership at the beginning of its regime was willing to respect the constitutionally protected rights of the working people. The new labor laws adopted in 1963 were based on the first labor laws adopted during the Syngman Rhee (Yi Sŭngman) government in 1953. Like the earlier ones, the new labor laws guaranteed the three basic rights of labor: freedom of association, collective bargaining, and collective actions. One major change was the addition of a restrictive clause regarding unions’ political activities. The new labor law prescribed that labor unions would not collect political funds from its members or use union dues for political purposes. The main motivation of the Park regime in restructuring the union and labor laws at this time was more political than economic, that is, to keep organized labor depoliticized and disconnected from political opposition groups.
By and large, the 1960s represented a relatively liberal period for laborunion activities. Although there were many administrative restrictions imposed on union organization, union-organizing efforts were not severely repressed, collective bargaining occurred regularly, and labor conflicts were handled without too much heavy-handed government involvement. During this period, as Ogle observed, “open conflict was allowed, and to some degree recognized as an inherent part of the process.”7 He noted that the representatives of the Urban Industrial Mission (UIM), which became the regime’s anathema in the 1970s, were routinely invited to participate in the FKTU’s educational meetings during the 1960s.8 The situation began to change toward the end of the 1960s. The South Korean economy ran into the first crisis of the export-oriented industrialization in the late 1960s, caused by serious balance-of-payment problems and widespread business failures in foreign-invested firms. Frequent labor disputes occurred in response to layoffs, delayed payments, and plant closures.
Between 1968 and 1971, several notable labor disputes occurred, including labor protests at the foreign-invested firms, Signetics Corporation and Oak Electronics in 1968, a large-scale, industry-wide strike by textile workers employed at sixteen cotton textile firms, a prolonged strike at the government-run Chosŏn Shipbuilding Company in 1969, and a hunger strike at a subsidiary of American Pfizer.9 The rising level of labor activism in the export sector, especially in foreign-invested industries, posed a clear threat to Park Chung Hee’s development program when the external economic climate was unfavorable. In response to this emerging crisis, Park took several extraordinary measures to improve the investment climate for foreign capital and the financial structure of domestic firms. In 1969, Park proclaimed Provisional Exceptional Law Concerning Labor Unions and the Settlement of Labor Disputes in Foreign-Invested Firms. It imposed severe restrictions on labor organizations and prohibited strikes in foreign-invested firms. This action marked a major turning point in the Park regime’s labor policies. It was only the beginning of a series of labor-repression measures, which the Park regime was going to implement in the following years.
Imposing Wholesale Repression: The Yusin Period
Several factors contributed to the rise of the dictatorial Yusin regime. The worsening economic condition, growing political opposition, Park Chung Hee’s near defeat to Kim Dae Jung (Kim Taejung) in the 1971 presidential election, the upcoming North-South meetings, Nixon’s visit to China in 1971, and the partial withdrawal of U.S. military forces from South Korea all caused great concern for Park Chung Hee and his political elites. Park’s response to all these economic and political challenges came in a harsh authoritarian manner. In December 1971 Park declared a state of emergency and proclaimed the Law Concerning Special Measures for Safeguarding National Security (LSMSNS). This emergency decree effectively closed all the political space and put a clamp on civil liberty. The immediate target of the measure was organized labor.
Article 9 of the LSMSNS specified (1) workers seeking to exercise their rights on collective bargaining and collective action must file an application to the appropriate government agency and must follow its regulatory decision and (2) the president has the right to take special measures to restrict the actions of the labor organizations engaged in government organizations or regional government offices, state-owned enterprises, public-interest enterprises, and other enterprises which have a serious impact on the national economy.10 In essence these emergency security measures suspended two of the workers’ three basic rights guaranteed by the constitution: the right to bargain collectively and to engage in collective actions.
In March 1972 the government introduced another restrictive measure, the Collective Bargaining under National Emergency measure. This measure expanded the range of enterprises defined as belonging to the public interest, which were then barred from union actions; it also placed further restrictions on the activities of industry-level unions. The culmination of all these authoritarian legislative actions was the installation of the dictatorial Yusin system in October 1972. The Yusin Constitution bestowed upon Park Chung Hee a lifetime presidency with unchecked executive power. But, for the working people, the Yusin Constitution and labor-law revisions introduced in 1973 and 1974 made little difference. For organized labor, all the repressive measures had already been put in place with the National Security Measures proclaimed in 1971.
While severely restricting union organization and union activities, the state also tried to reconfigure the union structure from an industrial union structure to an enterprise union system. This move was partly based on the realization that industrial unions are not the most reliable tools for maintaining control on local unions. As labor volatility grew, state planners began to fear that industrial unions may become an unwelcome base of labor power. Labor planners thus shifted their policies and tried to destroy industry unions and contain union activities within company-controlled enterprise unionism. The dominant character of the Yusin regime’s labor policy is nicely described by Song as follows:
If [the Park regime] employed an indirect method of co-opting the upper echelon of the union leadership and having them control industrial unions and their members during the 1960s when it had a lingering attachment to the idea of democracy, in the 1970s it had no hesitation to cast its attachment to democratic ideals and sought to control labor through supra-constitutional measures and by mobilizing the repressive administrative power.11
What characterized Park’s labor regime during the Yusin period was its security-oriented approach to labor and its heavy reliance on the threat of violence in controlling labor activism. The state tried to control labor activities through security forces rather than through legal and bureaucratic means. Park Chung Hee was not known for his patience in dealing with his political opponents. Labor activists were his enemy. He and his political elites seemed to have a strong conviction that those who were responsible for labor unrest, or those who tried to organize workers into independent unions in violation of labor laws, were influenced by, or linked to, communism. While ignoring customary violations of labor-practice laws by management, the state was quick and ruthless in cracking down on labor agitation. While workers’ pleas for government protection against labor abuses were most commonly ignored, employers’ requests for intervention to block unionization efforts were quickly responded to by the state. The inevitable consequence of such strong anti-labor state actions was a growing level of politicization and strong resentment against both the state and capital among workers.
IDEOLOGICAL MOBILIZATION
The Park government, of course, did not only try to demobilize labor and keep it as an atomized and pliable productive force. It also tried to mobilize laborers as motivated producers and as cooperative partners in increasing productivity in the workplace. Economic and ideological mobilization of workers was as important as their political demobilization. From his early days, Park Chung Hee was intent on mobilizing the working population with the ideologies of nationalism and developmentalism. The repeated slogans of minjok chunghŭng (restoring national glory) and Chal sara pose (Let’s try to live well) were not just empty words: they represented Park’s utmost desire and governing ideology. Accordingly, ideological mobilization of industrial workers constituted an important part of the Park government’s labor policies.
A major intent of the ideological mobilization of workers was to encourage them to work hard, to cooperate with managers to build an efficient economic system, and to restrain their demands until the economy had grown large enough to distribute the fruits of their labor. The first thing that Park’s leadership did to mobilize workers on the ideological and discursive levels was to label them as sanŏp ŭi chŏnsa (industrial warriors) or sanŏp ŭi yŏkkun (builders of industry). Workers were likened to soldiers fighting for national defense and national glory in the global economic war. Given the importance of exports in the nation’s development strategy, factory workers were also called such’ul ŭi yŏkkun or such’ul ŭi kisu (chief producers of exports). Working with dedication to promote exports was celebrated as a patriotic act that workers must be proud of. Ideologies of nationalism and developmentalism were wrapped up in a strong military rhetoric in order to shape the motivation and self-identity of the rapidly growing proletarian population engaged in export industries.
To what extent these nationalistic and developmental ideologies were effective in shaping the identity and consciousness of the working class during this period is not clear. Most probably, they influenced the public presentation of workers rather than their inner feelings or self-identity. Yet, it is interesting to notice that nationalistic and developmental language was frequently used by workers and workers’ organizations. For example, workers at the Wonpoong Textile Company who built one of the most independent and aggressive unions in the 1970s issued the following union resolution in 1973:
• We are the warriors of industrial peace and will make our utmost effort to increase productivity.
• We will make every effort to improve our working conditions with strong solidarity among ourselves.
• As champions of the working people, we will do our best to improve the quality of the union.12
In all likelihood, state-defined worker identity had only a limited effect on the true identity and consciousness of the workers. Although workers used these words themselves, due in large part to the lack of any other positive language describing themselves, they must have had a great deal of doubt and suspicion. As one worker wrote, “Who dares, with a shred of sincerity, to use those words like ‘industrial warriors’ or ‘pillars of export’ to call us, when we are not even allowed to express our own feelings?”13 Their daily working life and the way they were actually treated by society belied such an exalted image of industrial workers.
State leaders themselves must have realized that they could not depend on just a vacuous, symbolic exaltation of workers in order to assure continued labor submissiveness and industrial peace. The rise of labor volatility in the late 1960s and the growing interconnection between laborers and intellectuals must have made Park’s leadership aware of the necessity of finding a more powerful organizational form of ideological mobilization and control of the working people. The Saemaŭl Factory movement played a vital role in this regard.
The Saemaŭl movement was originally a rural movement implemented in the early 1970s, a massive government-directed, agriculturally cooperative effort to improve productivity and rural standards of living.14 Its major emphasis was to culturally or spiritually uplift the farming population by encouraging the cultural values of diligence, self-help, cooperation, and community spirit. With growing confidence drawn from the successful results of this program in rural areas, Park expanded this movement to all sectors of society.
The Saemaŭl Factory movement constituted a vital component of Park Chung Hee’s nation building program. It was formally implemented in 1973 with the same themes (or “saemaŭl spirit”) borrowed from the saemaŭl rural movement: “diligence, self-help, and teamwork.” Additionally, the Saemaŭl Factory movement put new emphasis on increased productivity and labormanagement cooperation. The themes of the movement are well articulated in many of Park Chung Hee’s speeches:
The Saemaŭl movement as practiced in offices and factories is nothing different [from the one now being practiced in the countryside] for its basic spirit remains the same: diligence, self-help, and teamwork. In a business corporation the entire personnel, from the president on down, should work together to reduce waste and improve efficiency, and devote their whole energy to increased productivity. There should be close labor-management cooperation, with the company president making an utmost effort to improve pay and welfare for his employees and the latter fulfilling their duties with a sense of responsibility and sincerity, doing factory work like their own personal work, and caring for the factory as if it were their own. In such a corporation, productivity will be high, thanks to the family-like atmosphere, and the workers will be well taken care of as due return for their faithful service.
…. Thereby complete harmony between employees and employers would be made possible, and on this basis efficiency and productivity can be promoted…. Therefore, this movement, as the labor-capital cooperation movement uniquely developed in our country, will become a driving force to build up national strength.15
In addition to the general themes transplanted from the rural saemaŭl movement, we can see that a critical idea promoted in the Saemaŭl Factory movement was that of familism or enterprise family ideology. The major slogan of the Saemaŭl Factory movement was this: “Treat employees like family. Do factory work like your own personal work.” This idea of the family-enterprise system basically denies the reality of conflict relations between labor and management and seeks to promote pseudo-family relations among all members of an enterprise. It borrows the rhetoric of a traditional patriarchal family—the employer is likened to a father, the worker to a son, and the manager to an elder brother. From the mid-1970s, one could find a large sign at every South Korean factory gate that read, “Treat employees like family members, do factory work like my own work!” This family enterprise ideology was frequently wrapped up within the national development ideology, in which labor cooperation and hard work were deemed essential to building a strong nation and were often elevated to the status of a citizen’s sacred duty.
The South Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry coordinated the Saemaŭl Factory movement. The key organizational components of the movement were saemaŭl leaders and saemaŭl work teams. The saemaŭl leaders were in charge of carrying out the movement under the direction of the top manager of the company. The saemaŭl work teams were composed of eight to fifteen workers and were involved in a wide range of production-rationalization programs. At the national level, saemaŭl educational centers played an essential role in training and indoctrinating saemaŭl leaders. There were twelve factory saemaŭl education centers throughout the country, and these centers, between 1973 and 1979, trained a total of 46,531 high-level managers.16 Labor unions, at all levels, were required to provide ethical training consonant with the saemaŭl movement. The FKTU established its own educational center in 1975 and functioned as a major vehicle of saemaŭl education. The union leaders were taught the following subjects: “the saemaŭl spirit and the labor-union movement; Yusin doctrine; the ideal posture of union leaders; church doctrine (indicating UIM and JOC activities) and the labor-union movement; North Korea’s situation; South Korea’s national security and unification; South Korea’s economic prospects; and Koreanized labor-capital relations.”17
It is important to realize that the Saemaŭl Factory movement was not simply a cultural or spiritual movement implemented in the factory setting. Its origin was more mundane and economic. The predecessor of the Saemaŭl Factory movement was the managerial attempts to copy the Japanese model of quality control circles as early as 1970. Various attempts were initiated at large firms to implement the Japanese style of production technology, but they remained sporadic and unsystematic in the early years. Then the 1973 oil shock presented a greater impetus to the rationalization movement at large manufacturing firms. The Saemaŭl Factory movement was partly a response to this managerial demand. It was thus very appropriate that the Ministry of Commerce and Industry was the central agency in charge of this movement.
From the workers’ point of view, the Saemaŭl Factory movement activities required them to work extra hours without compensation—they had to come to work earlier than their regular schedule, attend numerous extra meetings, and stay longer hours after regular work hours, most of which were not remunerated. Naturally, the level of workers’ grievance with the program was very high, and it worked as an important source of their increasing class awareness in the late 1970s and the 1980s.
Supplementing the Saemaŭl Factory movement was the Labor-Management Council, composed of the representatives of management and labor. Joint labor-management councils were first established in the late 1960s but only became important institutions after an amendment to the Labor Union Law in March 1973. The manifest function of this bipartite organization was to foster cooperative relations between management and labor and to boost labor productivity. The law stipulated that workers’ demands relating to wages, working conditions, and other grievances be handled by bipartite councils, which would weigh these issues against the primary concerns of increased productivity and labor-capital harmony. The government required that these councils be established in all the firms where unions existed. In essence, bipartite councils were anti-union organizations that took over many functions of labor unions and undermined laborers’ organizational strength.
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS AND LABOR RESISTANCE
One of the interesting puzzles in South Korea during the developmental decades is the continuous growth of labor discontent and resentment toward an industrial system that undoubtedly brought noticeable improvement to the working population. The decade of the 1970s in particular brought rapid wage increases. Not only did wages increase dramatically but the increase rate surpassed the rate of productivity. This was also the period of accelerated job creation in the industrial sector and, as labor economists argue, marked the end of unlimited labor supply. Such a macroeconomic performance was more than enough to justify Park Chung Hee’s basic orientation toward labor relations: workers must be willing to restrain their wish to exercise their political rights and cooperate with managers to increase productivity, and then all will be rewarded with the fruits of economic growth. The statistics of wage growth and income distribution during Park Chung Hee’s reign was clearly supportive of such developmental faith.
Unfortunately, however, workers were not happy with the way the South Korean economy was going and the ways the industry treated them. Their disaffection was partly due to low wages, which was the situation for a large proportion of workers employed in the labor-intensive sectors of industry. But more important sources of their grievances were harsh working conditions and extremely poor industrial relations. Exceptionally long work hours, hazardous working conditions, arbitrary exercise of power and contemptuous attitudes of managerial employees toward production workers, rampant sexual harassment—all of these were common features of most work places and caused great distress to helpless workers. Workers thus constantly cried for “humane treatment.” Chŏn T’aeil’s self-immolation in 1970 dramatized this problem. His deep sense of frustration and anger was widely shared among the majority of factory workers.
State planners were, most likely, not unaware of these problems but did not bother to confront them in any serious manner. There were only occasional and sporadic efforts to enforce laws on unfair labor practices. Park Chung Hee, from time to time, made speeches telling employers to treat their workers like family members. He also forced top industrialists to implement company welfare programs, like dormitories for workers, mess halls, company savings and loan associations, scholarship programs, and the like. In large-scale firms, these were part of the Saemaŭl Factory movement. However, it does not seem that Park Chung Hee and his economic planners really understood the magnitude of labor suffering or that the developmental policies were, to a great extent, responsible for industrial despotism and, consequently, a source of widespread labor resentment.
A chief merit of Park Chung Hee’s developmental state, as Amsden clearly recognizes, is that the state exercised its disciplinary power over both capital and labor to ensure proper performance.18 Park indeed had a puritan work ethic and a keen performance orientation. In exchange for state subsidies and protection, capitalists were expected to perform according to the state’s performance criteria. But Park’s criteria narrowly concerned export performance. Those export manufacturers who helped the state achieve the export target each year were rewarded with low-interest investment funds and exclusive investment licenses. Such a development policy encouraged an expansionist-investment strategy among South Korean capitalists, which resulted in serious consequences for industrial relations.
As long as industrialists were primarily concerned with meeting export targets and with capturing new profitable investment ventures by proving quantitative success in export markets, they would have minimal interest in developing a stable and committed workforce or in cultivating workers’ skills and productivity by offering high wages or other incentives. While they tried to maximize profits by exploiting cheap labor, South Korean capitalists made minimum investments in improving work safety or developing company welfare systems. Nor did they invest much in manpower training of their workforce. Rather, it was the state that took primary responsibility in providing training and skill upgrading through state-run technical and vocational schools.
In retrospect, the Park era was a capitalists’ heaven: not only was the international market condition favorable but the developmental state was also completely pro-capital. The state did practically everything for the capitalists as long as they successfully carried out the state’s development plans. The state authority occasionally reprimanded the employers whose firms were involved in serious labor disputes but did not waste time in taking care of troubles in order to restore “industrial peace.” In any event, Park’s leadership failed to alleviate the high degree of labor exploitation and despotic exercise of authority in the South Korean industry.
When workers’ deepening discontent and resentment began to surface in a more organized fashion from the mid-1970s, the Park government was too shortsighted and too inflexible to modify its labor policy. It just increased the level of repression on labor activists while co-opting upper-level union leaders. It also tried to block the formation of independent unions which challenged the official, government-controlled FKTU. Park’s political elites refused to look at the emerging grassroots union movement as a genuine worker struggle for self-protection but saw it rather as a product of agitation by external political forces. They were either reluctant, or incapable of devising a more effective long-term strategy to deal with this problem other than intensifying the old methods of the cooptation, intimidation, firing, and blacklisting of union activists coupled with the exercise of violence.
The consequence of such a security-oriented and exclusionary approach of control led to the polarization of the South Korean union structure. At the national level, the official unions became the instruments of the state’s corporatist control of organized labor; at the grass-roots level, workers strived to create independent unions outside the official union structure. This is the “democratic union movement” that has become the main object of worker struggles since the Yusin Period. This was clearly a reaction to the dominant state strategy of labor containment. The Park regime’s labor strategy had turned the majority of existing unions into co-opted and powerless organizations, which were not simply unable to represent the interests of workers, but also frequently worked to suppress and distort laborer demands. Unlike corporatist systems in other countries, the Republic of Korea’s ostensible state-corporatist system did not employ a combination of inducement and control, but relied primarily on control without offering benefits; in other words, it used only the stick and not the carrot to keep unions under control. Official unions were deprived of any useful and legitimate role to play for rank-and-file workers. Consequently, worker struggles converged in an attempt to create an alternative organization in opposition to the official union structure.
By the last years of Park’s rule, it became increasingly clear that his labor regime was breaking down. The official union structure became ineffective and discredited, the Saemaŭl movement lost its ideological grip on workers, and the police and security agencies were incapable of controlling the expanding networks of grassroots activists and the growing level of worker identity and consciousness. Then came the economic recession caused by the second oil crisis, mounting foreign debt, and decreasing exports due to growing protectionism abroad. Labor disputes increased in frequency, and the intensity of conflicts also increased noticeably. Most frequently, these conflicts occurred in the labor-intensive sectors of export manufacturing where female workers were predominantly employed. As is well recognized, this early stage of the labor movement was led by young female workers who suffered double or triple doses of oppression and exploitation in the workplace.19
But no one would have imagined that a labor protest by some two hundred young women workers at a wig factory would have brought about a political crisis that would eventually put an end to Park Chung Hee’s rule. The labor conflict that occurred in 1979 at the wig manufacturing firm, Y.H. Trading Company, represents the nature of industrial conflicts and the mode of state control that was characteristic of the Park Chung Hee period.20 Established in 1966, the Y.H. Trading Company was one of the major wig exporters to the United States. Its founder, Y.H. Chang, emigrated to America in 1970 and established another trading company, leaving the management of the South Korean wig factory in the hands of his brother-in-law. Rather than concentrate on the wig business, the new manager diverted profits from Y.H. Trading Company to buy a new shipping company.
A third manager also made side investments in electronics and film production companies. Thus, Y.H. Trading Company exemplifies the expansionist-accumulation strategy and how it can hurt employees. The continuous outflow of capital made Y.H. Trading Company’s business unhealthy, especially because the worldwide wig market began declining in the 1970s. By the late 1970s, the total number of employees decreased from 4,000 to 1,800. In March 1979 the management announced a plan to close the plant, which triggered a strong reaction from the union, one of the new breed of independent unions formed in 1975. A series of sit-in demonstrations followed. As conflict between the management and the union escalated, several outside organizations became involved. Not only religious leaders and intellectuals, but also representatives from democratic unions at Wonpoong, Tongil, Control Data, Pando Trading, and Tonggwang textile companies attended the Y.H. union meetings. The Y.H. workers’ strike intensified as the announced date of the plant closing approached. The police were called in and were ready to break up the strike by force. Facing an imminent police attack, the strikers decided to move to another, safer place to continue their struggle. Surprisingly, the place they chose was the headquarters of the opposition party, the New Democratic Party (NDP) in downtown Seoul.
On the morning of August 9, 1979, 187 Y.H. workers stormed into the NDP building and occupied the fourth floor of the building as their new demonstration site. The NDP headquarters was immediately surrounded by police, and tension rose as then NDP President Kim Young Sam (Kim Yŏngsam) declared his support for the striking workers. A highly emotional and tense confrontation between the strikers and the police lasted for two days. At dawn on the third day (August 11), some one thousand riot police broke into the building. They smashed windows, threw over furniture, and applied indiscriminate violence to NDP party members, opposition congressmen, and newspaper reporters, as well as to the desperately resistive Y.H. workers. In the midst of this police violence, one worker fell to her death from the fourth floor. Kim Young Sam was taken away by force.
Although Y.H. workers sacrificed much and achieved nothing, their valiant effort contributed tremendously to the externalization and politicization of labor movements, and to the fusion of both labor and pro-democracy political struggles. The Y.H. incident had greater political repercussions than just its impact on the labor movement. The New Democratic Party, which had been more or less aloof from the labor movement so far, became inadvertently involved with labor conflict. Party politics plunged deeply into crisis when the ruling party ousted Kim Young Sam from his congressional seat, charging him with inciting violence and social instability. Mass demonstrations occurred in Pusan, Kim’s congressional district, and spread to the neighboring industrial city, Masan. Participants in the street demonstrations were not just students but also included workers, the unemployed, and ordinary citizens, who had become deeply disaffected with the Park government’s authoritarian practices. The recessionary state of the South Korean economy during this period helped escalate the political unrest. As political protests intensified and spread across the country, a crack began to occur within the ruling group, and serious rivalries developed among Park’s aids, which eventually led to Park Chung Hee’s assassination by his own CIA chief on October 26, 1979.
A key accomplishment of Park Chung Hee’s labor policies was their internal consistency. His economic policies were consistently based on the same principle of placing national goals above individual ones, putting economic growth before distribution, protecting capitalists’ interests before that of labor. Park’s orientation toward labor was also consistent, which may be characterized as productionist and instrumental—he looked at industrial labor primarily as an element of production and as an instrument of economic development. And his chief concern was how to maintain the labor force and labor market in the most optimum condition for rapid economic growth. He had a firm belief that the best, and the only, way to improve the living standards of the working people was to achieve economic growth. Workers thus were expected only to work hard, cooperate with management to improve productivity, refrain from making political demands, and always be mindful of the nation’s security situation in a hostile world. Park and his economic planners rarely looked at laborers in human terms, as rights-bearing citizens. If the human side of labor came into consideration, it was mainly their potential to disrupt the nation’s economic plan. Military leaders had a deep suspicion about the real motive of the labor movement. In short, Park Chung Hee’s labor policies pursued the goal of mobilizing and demobilizing labor simultaneously—that is, mobilizing labor’s productive economic power and demobilizing their potential political power.
The Factory Saemaŭl movement was the most important mechanism implemented by the Park regime for the mobilization of workers. It established an impressive array of bureaucratic apparatuses to mobilize workers for increased productivity and cooperation with management. The demobilization of labor was based primarily on the draconian emergency measure proclaimed in 1971, the Law Concerning Special Measures for Safeguarding National Security, and a whole battery of other security-oriented measures. Both approaches were highly authoritarian and heavy handed, and they were possible because the state possessed an enormous amount of power to mobilize and demobilize the population. And these policies were effective as far as enforcing the world’s longest work hours and maintaining a high level of industrial peace, despite some volatility in the labor arena.
In the long run, however, the labor-relations system that the Park government developed was neither an effective nor a rational system. Apart from humanistic considerations, the system involved too many internal contradictions and weaknesses, and the system broke down by the end of Park’s rule. We can identify several of its internal weaknesses. First of all, Park’s ostensibly state-corporatist system of labor control was a faulty one. Although it adopted the same organizational structure as other state-corporatist structures, its actual operation, as described above, was quite different. Rather than foster unionism and use officially sanctioned unions as a mediating mechanism in state-labor relations, the Park government was uninterested in allowing official unions to function as legitimate organizations of labor representation.
State power was primarily interested in co-opting and manipulating the leadership of the official unions while suppressing unionization efforts in general. While the corporatist strategy of labor control is supposed to be based on both incentives and constraints in dealing with unions, the Park government relied primarily on constraints rather than on incentives, in other words, on sticks rather than on carrots. In the end, the Park government’s repressive and manipulative approach to unions led to the alienation of the majority of the working people from the official union structure and to the emergence of grassroots independent unionism.
Second, Park Chung Hee’s approach to labor mobilization based on traditional values of family, cooperation, hierarchy, and community was bound to fail, as the value orientation of industrial workers was rapidly changing. Park’s attitude toward workers may be correctly described as paternalism, and he must have genuinely wanted to create a paternalistic business system. A major objective of the Saemaŭl Factory movement was to train managers to create such a system. In this regard, Park Chung Hee clearly wanted to emulate the Japanese model of enterprise paternalism. Unlike the case of Japanese paternalism, however, Park’s economic planners made little effort to force employers and managers to improve their company welfare system and to treat their workers with more respect.
The Factory Saemaŭl movement exacted longer working hours and greater compliance from workers but enforced very little reciprocity from employers. In short, the South Korean economic elites made little effort to give substance to the rhetoric of enterprise family and family-like industrial relations—in contrast to what the Japanese economic bureaucracy did to develop their paternalistic business system in the early decades of the twentieth century.21
The third, and the most serious failing of Park Chung Hee’s labor regime, was its neglect to develop a better legal and institutional foundation for mature industrial relations; instead, the government relied heavily on security-oriented control by the police, the KCIA, and military security forces. During the Yusin period, the constitution, labor laws, and the Bureau of Labor Affairs played minor roles in controlling labor. Instead, the major agency of labor control was security agencies, and the main method of control was not legal procedures but intimidation and violence used by these agencies. Hardly any attempts to create or maintain independent union organization were free from hostile actions by the police or the KCIA. And only a handful of large-scale labor protests occurred without the exercise of violence by the police, the kusadae (save-the-company corps), or management-backed male workers hired to fight against resistant female workers. Violence or the threat of violence was an integral part of labor control and labor activism during the period of the Park Chung Hee regime and his military successors. Protesting workers themselves often resorted to violence, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, using iron pipes, or even committing self-immolation. The sad reality was that an industrial authority based on violence bred violent resistance from the workers.
In short, Park Chung Hee’s labor regime left an unfortunate legacy. It was a legally and institutionally underdeveloped system of labor control. It encouraged managerial despotism in industry and made capitalists ill prepared for the growing power of labor by overprotecting capital against labor. Its reliance on security ideology and the constant threat of violence encouraged a militant and violence-prone resistance movement on the part of the working class. The militant, uncompromising, and violent pattern of South Korean labor activism that many people deplore today derived from the repressive and security-oriented approach of labor control that was laid down during the Park Chung Hee period. Furthermore, the strong mistrust among labor, capital, and the state formed during the authoritarian period continues to act as a major obstacle to building a productive and cooperative industrial relations system in the age of globalization.
1. Song Hogŭn, “Pak Chŏnghŭi chŏngkwŏn ŭi kukka wa nodong: nodong chŏngch’i ŭi han’gye” 199–234.
2. Here I agree with Professor Paik Nak-chung who critiques in Chapter 4 of this book the legacy of the Park Chung Hee era in terms of “unsustainable development,” rather than simply on moral or ideological grounds.
3. Kim Chun, “5.16 ihu nodong chohap ŭi chaep’yŏn kwa ‘Han’guk Noch’ong ch’eje’ ŭi sŏngnip”; Song Hogŭn, “Pak Chŏnghŭi chŏngkwŏn ŭi kukka wa nodong.”
4. Park Y. K., Labor and Industrial Relations in Korea: System and Practice; Jangjip Choi, Labor and the Authoritarian State.
5. Jangjip Choi, Labor and the Authoritarian State; Kim Chun, “5.16 ihu nodong chohap ŭi chaep’yŏn”; Song Hogŭn, “Pak Chŏnghŭi chŏngkwŏn ŭi kukka wa nodong.”
6. Philippe C. Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism,” 7–53; Jangjip Choi, Labor and the Authoritarian State.
7. George E. Ogle, South Korea, 17.
8. Ibid., 88.
9. Jangjip Choi, Labor and the Authoritarian State.
10. Kim Samsu, “Pak Chŏnghŭi sidae ŭi nodong chŏngch’aek kwa nosa kwan’gye,” 183–212.
11. Song Hogŭn, “Pak Chŏnghŭi chŏngkwŏn ui kukka wa nodong,” 222.
12. Wŏnp’ung Mobang Haego Nodongja Pokchik T’ujaeng Wiwŏnhoe, Minju nojo 10 nyŏn: Wŏnp’ung Mobang Nodong Chohap hwaltong kwa t’ujaeng, 83.
13. Tongil Pangjik Pokchik T’ujaeng Wiwŏnhoe, Tongil Pangjik Nodong Chohap undongsa, 49.
14. For a detailed description of the Saemaŭl movement, see Hyung-A Kim, Korea’s Development under Park Chung Hee, 133–47.
15. Park Chung Hee, “Saemaul: Korea’s New Community Movement,” Presidential Address, National Conference of Saemaul Leaders, December 9, 1977, Cited from Jangjip Choi, Labor and the Authoritarian State, 183.
16. Hyung-A Kim, Korea’s Development under Park Chung Hee, 143.
17. Jangjip Choi, Labor and the Authoritarian State, 186–87.
18. Alice Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant.
19. George E. Ogle, South Korea; Seung-Kyung Kim, Class Struggle or Family Struggle?; Hagen Koo, Korean Workers; Soonok Chun, They Are Not Machines.
20. For a more detailed description of this event, see Hagen Koo, Korean Workers, 89–96.
21. Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan.