Past Events at the Centre for the Study of Korea
September 2013
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Friday, September 20th A New Attempt at Organizing Irregular Workers in Korea: Examining the Activities of the Korean Women’s Trade Union
Date Time Location Friday, September 20, 2013 2:00PM - 4:00PM Seminar Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
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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.
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.
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Friday, September 27th Debating Educational Justice in South Korea: Gazing at Finland and the U.S.
Date Time Location Friday, September 27, 2013 12:00PM - 2:00PM Seminar Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
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Description
Increasingly today, individuals and states take stock of how other people educate their children. South Koreans have long looked to the U.S. as an educational other – a gaze that came to new life as more and more children and families joined a project of educational exodus beginning in the late 1990s and peaking in the first decade of the 2000s. Interestingly, in recent years South Korean education has become an object of the U.S. gaze and seems to be President Obama’s favorite educational other. But the picture is not so simple: just as the U.S. has long debated educational equity and achievement so too has South Korea. And recently Finland seems to be on everyone’s map as the “happy alternative.” I examine how these gazes reveal the very complicated landscape of thinking about class, social mobility, and social justice in South Korea today. I also introduce a middle school student, Alex (and his mother), to showcase the family-level experience of South Korea’s internal educational debate.
Nancy Abelmann is Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She writes on family, class, gender, education, and migration with a focus on South Korea and Korean/Asian America.
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.