Public Employee Unionization and Path Dependency in Korean Social Concertation

Abstract

Public employee unionization has been a core agenda in Korean social concertation since the military-backed Roh Tae Woo government. The 1998 Social Pacts made an agreement to organize public employee unions in the Kim Dae Jung government. This study pays attention to the historical context of social concertation systems that played an important role in organizing public employee unions in Korea. This study suggests that path dependency in the social concertation systems is a key variable for explaining public employee unionization in Korea. In particular, path dependencies in human resource composition and agenda setting elaborated and deepen the discussion about the issues related to public employee unionization. Social concertation systems(the LLRC, the LMRRC, and the KTC) showed a strong path dependency in the composition of human resources although each government had its own political characteristics. About 67 percent of the LLRC members joined the LMRRC as regular members and 40 percent of the LMRRC members participated in the KTC. The similarities of human resource composition in the social concertation systems are positively associated with path dependency in agenda setting. The path dependency in agenda setting was outstandingly showed in the issue of public employee unions. A permission level of labor basic rights for rank-and-file civil servants has been quite similar from a draft bill of the LLRC to the public employee unions act of the KTC. Without the experiences of the LLRC and the LMRRC, it was impossible for the KTC to make the public employee unionization in 1998.