Description

It is difficult to organize irregular workers, especially female irregular workers in Korea, as many of them are employed by small enterprises, change their jobs frequently and enter and leave the labor market according to economic fluctuations. Therefore, the Korean Women’s Trade Union (KWTU) has tried to build a new model of a trade union, and a new idea of a labor movement, which are different from the enterprise unions for male regular workers in order to organize female irregular workers who have been entirely excluded from the protection of labor laws, the welfare system and the trade union. While the enterprise unions have concentrated on protecting employment and improving working conditions for union members at each workplace, the KWTU has been an independent women’s trade union open to all working women, regardless of their industry, occupation, region, or employment status. In this lecture, we will consider the activities of the KWTU as well as its implications.

Nobuko Yokota is a Professor of Korean Socio-Economic History in the Graduate School of East Asian Studies at the Yamaguchi University. Dr. Yokota studies the formation of the working class in the Republic of Korea, primarily from the latter half of the 1960s to the present. Her central concern has been to analyze historical developments in the labour movement, industrial relations, employment patterns, and labour policies in South Korea, in conjunction with structural changes in the Korean labour market during this period. She received the encouragement prize of the Society for the Study of Social Policy in Japan for her book The Urban Under-stratum and Workers in Korea: Focusing on Non-Standardization of Labor in 2012.