Strategic Capacity and Coordinated Bargaining in the South Korean Labor Movement

• In Event: New Frontiers of Korean Political Economy

Abstract

This study investigates new terrains of union revitalization against the rise of precarious work and explains how strategic capacity contributes to their success. Union revitalization approaches have emphasized labor unions' attempts to include and represent precarious workers. While many studies focused on organizing, they did not analyze a renewal of coordinated bargaining in the context of the decentralization of collective bargaining.
In that respect, it is notable that the strategic capacity of South Korean schools' irregular worker(SIW) movements has achieved an evolution from union organizing to the institutionalization of coordinated bargaining. In the early 2000s, SIW in the public sector emerged from outsourcing by new public management. In the early period, although independent unions succeeded in organizing them, established unions failed despite the amount of resources. Independent unions' success resulted from strategic capacity based on the strength of latecomers. However, with a shift in political opportunity in the 2010s, while traditional unions rapidly organized SIWs, independent union organizing was less successful. And established unions also succeeded in building centralized bargaining structures. These successes were driven by new leaders' strategic capacities to reevaluate existing methods and creatively recombine them.
As a result, first, our case study reveals that building coordinated bargaining structures is a new dimension of union revitalization. Second, although we show that strategic capacities consistently matter, their types are various. Third, their effects are distinct by the conditions in the interaction between resource distributions and political opportunity. Therefore, our study will contribute to broadening the union research.

Author

• Jindu Kim, Hanyang University