Korean Skilled Workers: Toward a Labor Aristocracy by Hyung-A Kim

Abstract

Reviewed by: Korean Skilled Workers: Toward a Labor Aristocracy by Hyung-A Kim Carter J. Eckert Korean Skilled Workers: Toward a Labor Aristocracy by Hyung-A Kim. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xvii + 212. $99.00 hardcover, $30.00 paper. "Nothing prospers," Sophocles writes, "without pain and toil."1 While South Korea's spectacular rise to economic world prominence in the late twentieth century owes much to its strong developmental state headed by former army general Park Chung Hee 朴正熙, who seized political power in a military coup d'état in May 1961, neither the state's aggressive export regime that drove the economy during those years nor its astonishing statistical achievements can be comprehended without reference to the composition and competitiveness of the country's labor force. In an earlier book, Hyung-A Kim examines the dynamic triumvirate in the presidential Blue House consisting of Park, his chief-of-staff Kim Chŏngnyŏm 金正濂, and second economic secretary O Wŏnch'ŏl 吳源哲, who together under Park's leadership presided over the state's vast Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) project in the 1970s.2 Now in a new book based on a trove of archival and unpublished materials, extensive interviews with many key figures, and an impressive utilization of Korean and other secondary sources, Kim focuses on another crucial part of the development story, the rise of a skilled labor force, taking the narrative beyond the Park years to explore its many twists, turns, and implications. Chapter 1 opens the story in the 1970s with the creation of what Park calls "industrial warriors" (sanŏp chŏnsa 産業戰士), a technically trained and skilled workforce, without whom the move from light industry, based largely on cheap, unskilled labor, to capital- and technology-intensive HCI could not be accomplished. From the onset of Park's rule, HCI had always been an ultimate vision. But it was not until the early 1970s that the practical economic and financial foundations were in place to pursue this vision. By then the HCI idea had become intertwined in Park's mind with a massive upgrading of the [End Page 169] state's export regime and an equally ambitious development of an independent national defense industry. As with all major development projects during Park's eighteen-year tenure, every stop was pulled out to implement HCI plans. These plans were drawn up within the presidential Blue House and implemented in a military style throughout the bureaucracy and society, including through the New Community movement (Saemaŭl undong 새마을운동), the state's octopus-like ideological and mobilization apparatus. As a crucial part of the HCI project, the development of skilled labor was implemented with the same totalizing approach, through state-sponsored enhancement of science and technology, competitive public and private mass technical and vocational training, and adjustment of the three-year military conscription system to permit young men with sufficient technical training to fulfill their army service as "special soldiers" (t'ŭngnyebyŏng 特例兵) within some area of the sprawling HCI landscape. By the time of Park's assassination in 1979, South Korea had produced a whole new labor force of skilled workers. In contrast to the more mixed labor force that led the 1960s export push in light industry, HCI labor was highly gendered: the new workers were almost entirely young men. HCI labor also tended to be inherently more politically conservative, as these young men were largely from poor, rural backgrounds. They eagerly embraced the opportunities for educational advancement and economic rewards afforded by the state—opportunities that they would otherwise never have had. In effect, Kim suggests that HCI workers and the state during the Park years came to a mutual understanding: a tacit "reciprocal social contract" (p. 7) by which the former largely eschewed labor activism for secure jobs and upward social mobility. The subsequent four chapters trace the evolution of HCI workers as an increasingly separate and self-conscious segment of the South Korean labor force. As Kim writes in chapter 2, this self-segmentation was already becoming clear in the decade after Park's death, even as HCI workers broke their unwritten social contract with the state in the wake of Park's...