Description

This study investigates how particular configurations of institutional conditions cause high rate of non-standard employment rate in the Republic of Korea. We investigate how employment protection legislation, unemployment benefit and statutory minimum wages are associated with non-standard employment. Then, we focus on the female non-standard workers and examine the re-entrance of female workers in the Korean labour market. We highlight that women in their 40s has the highest rate of employment among all female worker and that a large proportion of these women are entering into non-standard employment. In approaching to this question, we examine the political economy of this phenomenon by first discussing the demand side of the Korean labour market with gendering of the varieties of capitalism argument and then the supply side with the work-life balance argument. When examining the re-entrance of the labour market, women with general skills with lower education and high education both found it more feasible to re-enter to the labour market as non-standard workers. While work and life balance is a prominent reason for women’s choice of opting out of the labour market, work and life balance choice mattered less for women re-entering the labour market as non-standard workers in their 40s and 50s but instead the firm based skill formation mattered more. In addition, the retail service industry is suggested to absorb a large number of female works with lower skill level who would have had difficulties in re-entering into other male oriented companies.

Sophia Seung-yoon Lee obtained her doctorate degree in social policy at the University of Oxford in 2011 and is now an assistant professor of social policy at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. Before joining Ewha, she also worked at Kyoto University as a GCOE assistant professor.