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How has South Korea’s labor movement changed over the past two decades? A forum marking the 19th anniversary of the Korea Labor Institute and held on Sept. 19 looked at a variety of aspects of the labor movement in an attempt to answer this and other questions.

The outcome of an analysis conducted at the forum revealed that the union membership rate has fallen and an increasing number of people have negative opinions about union activities, demanding that unions concentrate on protecting the rights of contract-based workers and other underprivileged colleagues, instead of excessively pursuing material gains. Due to the instability in the job market, income disparity is greater than it was in the early 1980s and the number of poor laborers who appeared after the financial crisis in 1997 has also increased.

Korean people have increasingly expressed their objection to the labor movement by remaining silent, Lee Soo-bong, the policy coordinator for the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, said at the forum. Figures confirmed the sense of crisis.

At the forum, Oh Gae-taek, a Korea Labor Institute researcher, unveiled a survey of 2,000 people, which was conducted to see how they view the nation’s labor activities. Of those polled, 16 percent of the respondents thought that strengthened labor activities would contribute to the nation’s economic growth, far less than the 53.3 percent holding this opinion in a similar survey done in 1989. Only 41.3 percent saw labor unions’ demands as just, compared with 67 percent in 1989.

Of note is that only 5.4 percent of those surveyed cited labor unions as the most reliable organizations, far less than civic groups (41 percent), the media (15.2 percent), the government (11.9 percent) and conglomerates (7.2 percent).

Nevertheless, people still have high expectations for labor unions. Of those polled, 34.4 percent wanted labor organizations to play a role in political democratization, while 40.2 percent called for an improvement in social inequality.

In the meantime, the union membership rate has dropped dramatically for the past two decades. The ratio peaked at 18.5 percent at the end of 1987 before it fell to 10.3 percent in 2005.

Cho Sung-jae, a KLI researcher, said, “Following the financial crisis in the late 90s, the number of unionized workers has not changed a lot, but the efforts of labor unions to organize workers have failed to catch up with the increase in the number of salaried workers.”

Data showed that the ratio of workers in the manufacturing sector has decreased from 43.1 percent to 27.6 percent, while that of the service sector surged from 11.9 percent to 30.4 percent.

While the nation has enjoyed rapid income growth due to compressed economic growth from 1987-1996, the income disparity between the haves and have-nots has widened since 2003 as the poorest people took the brunt of high unemployment. The relative poverty ratio among urban households also rose to 10.8 percent in 2006 from 10.2 percent recorded in 1982.

A more serious problem is that the number of underprivileged workers is rapidly increasing. Of them, 59.9 percent are able to work and those working but remaining poor stood at 30.6 percent. This shows that it is more important to provide better-paying jobs rather than decreasing the unemployment rate.

In addition, it is not easy to overcome poverty. According to Lee, of the KCTU, the possibility of irregular workers obtaining regular worker status is 13.8 percent, less than half of the 30.5 percent average in the 15-member European Union.

The nation’s job market has undergone significant change over the last 20 years. The employment rate has decreased most distinctly among young men, according to the Korea Labor Institute. Though young women have been relatively successful in joining the job market, women in their 30s and 40s ranked the lowest in job recruitment rates among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations.

There have also been changes in the wage system. Until 1996, only 5 percent of companies with more than 100 employees adopted the annual salary system. After the financial crisis hit the nation, the ratio surged to 35 percent with one out of five companies providing dividends based on job performance to their workers.

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