In Korean Skilled Workers, Hyung-A Kim provides a valuable account of blue-collar workers in the heavy industries in South Korea from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The creation of skilled workers and engineers in the 1970s in South Korea has been analyzed by scholars in the history of science and technology and in science and technology studies, while the labor movement has been studied extensively in political science and sociology. In this book, Kim nicely combines these previously separate interests and traces how the collective identity of skilled workers in the heavy industries was formed and changed.
The book begins with a discussion of how the developmentalist government was able to produce a mass of skilled workers by establishing institutions such as technical high schools and on-site vocational training centers in the 1970s. Students of these institutions were mostly young, smart males who had little chance of receiving economic support for higher education from their families. Under strict social contracts, the graduates of these institutions were deployed in various nation-building projects, sometimes instead of serving the military. These “industrial warriors” fought in automobile factories, petrochemical refineries, and dockyards with the weapons of technical skills to help make the nation strong and wealthy.
The rest of the book follows how the collective identity of these skilled workers changed from “industrial warriors” to “Goliat warriors” and, finally, to “labor aristocracy.” According to the book, the labor activism of the heavy industry workers in the 1980s had two unique characteristics. The first was a distinctive labor militancy, using intense strikes that often involved physical demonstrations, such as climbing up the Goliat crane as a means to express their requests. Second, students-turned-workers (hakch'ul), in collaboration with intellectuals, played a significant role in creating a surge of labor union movements. But their role also brought “ideological incompatibility” (p. 59). This book is interested in demonstrating such incompatibility by analyzing the workers’ perspectives on hakch'ul activists. While workers aimed to achieve better living with higher wages and shorter working hours, student activists had ideological purposes. Kim argues that their collaboration was only pragmatic from the perspective of the skilled workers and thus was destined for separation because of the ideological differences.
The so-called IMF crisis, or the Asian economic crisis, was another critical moment of shifting identity. Passing through these financial crises and the neoliberal measures introduced as a way out of the crises on the advice of the International Monetary Fund, Kim strongly suggests, the unionized skilled workers made securing parochial self-interests a top priority. When Hyundai Motor Company faced restructuring in 1998, for instance, unions “openly used nonregular in-house subcontractor workers (predominantly female workers) as a buffer to safeguard the existing jobs of their union members” (p. 97). This book argues that a class consciousness emerged as a labor aristocracy was created during the financial crisis, which ended up strengthening the divide between regular workers in full-time permanent positions (chŏnggyujik) and nonregular, subcontracted workers (pijŏnggyujik) in the 2000s. This is the pinnacle of this book, which directly supports Kim's challenge to the traditional view of “strong state, weak labor” (p. 9). By forming a class of labor aristocracy, Korean skilled workers were no longer the subject of oppression but became one of the strongest interest groups.
Overall, this book provides a great introduction to the history of South Korea's working class as well as insightful analyses of their social and political positions in contemporary South Korean society. One of the book's few shortcomings, however, is that little analysis is provided of the second and third generations of skilled workers. As a reader, I found it confusing as to whether this book traces the first generation of skilled workers over time or analyzes workers and their identities at different periods. Further, it raises questions about how new generations of skilled workers played a role in what is discussed in the rest of the chapters. The South Korean government invested in not only technical high schools but also college-educated engineers. Asking how the different generations of skilled workers and engineers changed their collective identity would have enriched the analysis of this valuable contribution.
Korean Skilled Workers is mostly interested in workers, not skills. Briefly mentioned in this regard is multifunctionalization and how it increased labor flexibility in the 1990s. Multifunctionalization integrated several jobs so that multiple workers were no longer needed on the shop floors; for instance, in Daewoo Heavy Industry, one worker with relatively high skills replaced four skilled workers. As this case demonstrates, paying attention to how skills were valued—and by extension, the workers who possessed those skills—can provide a fuller picture of why and how skilled workers felt a great need to secure their employment since the 1990s. How did the introduction of new technologies or new process designs in the heavy industries affect the workers’ negotiation powers? In what way did the relative values of the skilled workers put them in precarious positions over time? Despite the increasing debate on automation and working-class jobs in many Asian countries, these questions are largely left unanswered in the Korean context, not just in this book but in the relevant scholarship.
