Segmented Quality of Working Life

Abstract

During the past decade, the force of the market has become increasingly dominant in determining employment relations patterns on the global level. In the context of growing global competition, firms have tried to reshape the existing employment relations in the market-driven direction. In particular, management has taken a variety of actions to “unbundle” corporate structure and externalize employment relations by resorting to outsourcing, spin-offs, and the increased use of non-regular labor. Meanwhile, labor unions in most industrialized countries have experienced the shrinkage of their organizational base and political leverage under the pressure of globalization, and have become a more passive role-player in reforging employment relations schemes than ever, albeit a wide variance of unions’ influence across countries.Along with the proliferated use of non-regular labor (i.e. fixed-term workers, part-timers, temporary help-agency labor, on-call labor, and independent contractor), which can be viewed as a core part of the externalizing trend of employment relations, a new division line in the labor market has drawn attention of concern among academics and practitioners. In Korea, as a matter of fact, the total size of non-regular workforce has surpassed that of regular workers since the 1998 economic crisis, and the former’s working conditions (i.e. wages, employment, corporate welfare, legal protection, and shop floor relations) have proven to be quite precarious and marginal, compared to the latter’s. In this light, our paper intends to offer an analytical view on the segmented quality of working life, which has been further polarized between regular and non-regular workers in Korea. By drawing on the analysis of the government’s official labor statistics and related surveyed data, we attempt to examine the growing trends and current employment conditions of non-regular workers, and to address some policy issues to tackle social problems, derived from this recent segmentation of national labor composition.KeywordsHourly WageUnion DensityWage EarningRegular WorkerMonthly WageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.