Few developments in South Korean history have garnered as much attention as its rapid economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1962, its per capita gross national product rank in the world was ninety-ninth, but by 1986, it had jumped to forty-fourth, outpacing other newly industrialized countries such as Brazil and Mexico. This growth has been attributed primarily to two factors: first, the centralizing force of state-led and state-owned modernization policies under Park Chung Hee (1961–79), and second, the colonial legacy of “weak labor,” which played into the strategies of the developmental state. Hwasook Nam, in Building Ships, Building a Nation: Korea's Democratic Unionism under Park Chung Hee, challenges this widely held view that a strong state and “weak” labor were the defining characteristics of South Korean economic development. Instead, Nam argues that the labor movement was far more animated than stagnant, as well as democratic and militant during much of the 1950s and 1960s. To illustrate this vibrancy, Nam focuses on the workers of the country's first and largest shipyard during the 1960s, the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation (KSEC, now Hanjin Heavy Industries). In relaying the story of labor's dynamism, she challenges two other suppositions about workers' activism during the Park years: that the labor movement of the 1960s and 1970s had no connection with the radicalism of the colonial or postliberation era, and that it did not influence the militant social movements of the 1980s.

In two introductory chapters that compose the first part of the monograph, Nam illustrates how legacies of the colonial and early Cold War eras affected KSEC workers. First, the colonial past influenced the composition of the labor force insofar as many KSEC employees of the 1950s had begun building ships under Japanese rule (1910–45). Second, the KSEC union was connected to the militant postliberation National Council of Korean Labor Unions (Chosŏn nodong chohap chŏn'guk p'yŏngŭihoe or Chŏnp'yŏng), as company employees joined and supported the Chŏnp'yŏng local at KSEC (p. 35).

Chapters 3–6 make up the second part of the book, which describes how a democratic union emerged. Although the KSEC local was founded in 1953, its members did not engage in radical activities until the 1960s. After the 1960 April Revolution, however, the union not only organized strikes but also promoted egalitarian practices, following the principle of hahu sangbak, supporting “lower raises for the higher paid [workers] and higher raises for the lower paid” (p. 74). Central to these changes were the activities of KSEC technical graduates (yangsŏnggong), “who began employment at the yard as apprentices (kyŏnsŭpkong).” They, together with other apprentices, formed a vociferous group that “pressured the union to take up their cause” (p. 77). Nam argues that the cooperation between workers of different statuses among KSEC unionists showed “the company and the society at large what an ideal democratic society should look like and how capable workers were in constructing a democratic and egalitarian community” (p. 116).

The KSEC union achieved progressive change in the early 1960s, but the national project of development came to supersede democracy, which is the focus of Nam's last four chapters. The privatization of the yard and the strained relations between the KSEC local and the Maritime Union ignited what Methodist missionary George E. Ogle called “‘perhaps Korea's most famous modern strike’—a series of sit-ins, demonstrations, labor disputes, and strikes that occurred at the KSEC yard from March 1968 through October 1969” (p. 155). What ended the protests—state intervention—defeated the union and paved the way for increasing government control over labor affairs in the 1970s.

Notwithstanding its quiescence in the 1970s, Nam argues that the KSEC local regained its militancy by the late 1980s. In addition, KSEC workers once again attempted to democratize the union by backing the candidacy of a young female welder, Kim Chisuk, for the 1986 union representatives' election. Although their support of a woman implied gender equality, the lack of gendered egalitarianism is a topic that might have received more attention in the analysis. Nam laudably notes in parts of the work that the union's discourse was “anchored in an evolving masculine subjectivity of workers as heads of households, whose sense of dignity and manliness depended on their ability to earn a decent family living wage” (p. 10). Nevertheless, the continued references to “democracy” and “egalitarianism” without qualification tend to minimize rather than emphasize gender disparities within shipbuilders' discourses of equity. Similarly, although Nam states that KSEC unionists were not necessarily concerned about the welfare of the South Korean working-class people as a whole (p. 75), the limits of the members' egalitarianism, particularly toward non-KSEC and light industrial workers, might have been examined more closely.

Despite these quibbles, that the work raises such questions is a true credit to the analytical rigor with which Nam has investigated one of the foremost employee unions in South Korea. Moreover, its use of an extensive variety of primary and secondary sources as well as rare material from the KSEC local archives is to be lauded. Apart from presenting a case study of a union and its members with microhistorial depth, Building Ships, Building a Nation fills a lacuna of knowledge on workers in the twentieth century, serving as an indispensable contribution to scholarship on labor relations in contemporary Korea and East Asia.