The rise of the Labor Party in South Korea: causes and limits

Abstract

The development of the Labor Party in South Korea will depend on whether politics evolves toward democratic deepening or neo-populism. It appears that the rise of the Labor Party in Korea was a political event that resulted from a prevailing current of democratic deepening. It was also a political event born of collective action on the part of civil society organizations and labor in the course of electoral reform. However, if the political regime does evolve in favor of neo-populism, the political conditions that would enable the Labor Party's sustainable development will be radically eroded. The prospects for the Labor Party in Korea might be regarded skeptically in political as well as economic respects.

Keywords:

• Korean Labor Party
• collective action
• election
• democratic deepening

Acknowledgements

This research was supported financially by the Korea Research Foundation (KRF 2004-B00027). The authors wish to express their gratitude to Chan-wook Park, Young-jae Jin, Won-taek Kang, Jin-young Kwak and Hyun-jin Seo for providing valuable comments and material.

Notes

1. For example, the unionization rate in the United Kingdom decreased from 70 percent in 1984 to 41 percent in 1998 (Schmit 2002).

2. It also champions the recovery of civil liberties, social justice and political participation that suffered as a result of the outgrowth of the state and the market (Carter 2002; Hirst 1993).

3. The ‘three lows’ refers to the fall in the price of oil, the fall in the value of the dollar, and the interbank offered rate (Lee 1997). With the three lows, the chaebol achieved rapid development; however, both the middle class and the working class had to endure a wage freeze, which further widened the gap between the rich and the poor (Lee et al. 2003).

4. The existing March 1994 Act stipulated that the parties that acquired more than 5 percent of the total effective votes or five seats in a constituency election were qualified to claim proportional representative seats in accordance with their achieved vote rates. One proportional representative seat was allocated to the parties which had obtained a voting rate of between 3 and 5 percent but had to acquire any seat or gained fewer than five seats in a constituency election.

5. For instance, Roh clearly expressed his intentions in relation to chaebol reform in the fourteenth Party General Meeting over which he presided (Sixteenth Presidency Takeover Committee 2003).

6. The Act relating to Class Action, which came into effect from 2005, was passed in the National Assembly in December 2003.

7. The social integrative business labor relationship included: (1) the business–labor relationship corresponding to international standards; (2) the formation of a partnership between business, labor and the government; (3) autonomous and responsible relationship with minimal government intervention and fair law enforcement; (4) the improvement of the worker's quality of life through a participatory and social integrative labor welfare system; and (5) stabilization of employment (The Vision of the Participatory Government, Homepage of the Blue House, http://www.president.go.kr/, 10 April 2004).

8. According to a KTC agreement reached in May 2002, the term ‘irregular job worker’ defines the three types of employment as follows: (1) temporary workers with a limited-term contract; (2) part-time workers working under 36 hours per week; and (3) dispatched workers or home workers (KTC agreement 2002).

9. Created in February 2004, just before the seventeenth general election, the GSDP did not receive enough attention from the public and media. It gained a mere 0.5 percent in the Party List Proportional Representation election.

10. The Kim Dae-jung government tended to restrain labor activists' participation in government organizations, while it recruited aggressively from among civil movement activists (Kim 2004).

11. For instance, four out of five members of the Labor Reform Task Force Team, including its chief, had labor-union-related careers. The Labor Reform Task Force Team was established in order to prevent labor conflicts by collecting opinions and suggesting rational alternatives (Blue House Briefing No. 10, 14 March 2003).