The Flexibility Strategy of State-Capital-Labor and its Result in Korea : The Segmentation of the Labor Market and Unionization and the Implications for Labor Issues

Abstract

This study observes the political economic mechanism of exclusionof the irregular labor from the relations of labor politics. Especially, after the economic crisis in 1997, the capital and the state in Korea have chosen a rigidstrategy for more flexible labor market without consideration on institutional arrangement around the labor politics. This wrong strategy caused the situation in which the irregular labor has been excluded from the core of the segmented labor market and already organized unions. In this study, historical institutionalism is used as the methodology. It is because that the kind of exclusion has been made by interactions of structure and power relations of the actors in a certain historical context. In the changed institutional arrangement, the core labor market has been reorganized and the big businesses have been in the center. Newly born form of the labor—the irregular workers—has not able to been included the traditional form of unions (enterprise unionism). Therefore the irregular workers in Korea have been experienced the dual problem of exclusionfrom the core labor market and unions.