Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Korean Workers PDF full book. Access full book title Korean Workers by Hagen Koo. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Hagen Koo Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501731777 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Forty years of rapid industrialization have transformed millions of South Korean peasants and their sons and daughters into urban factory workers. Hagen Koo explores the experiences of this first generation of industrial workers and describes its struggles to improve working conditions in the factory and to search for justice in society. The working class in South Korea was born in a cultural and political environment extremely hostile to its development, Koo says. Korean workers forged their collective identity much more rapidly, however, than did their counterparts in other newly industrialized countries in East Asia. This book investigates how South Korea's once-docile and submissive workers reinvented themselves so quickly into a class with a distinct identity and consciousness. Based on sources ranging from workers' personal writings to union reports to in-depth interviews, this book is a penetrating analysis of the South Korean working-class experience. Koo reveals how culture and politics simultaneously suppressed and facilitated class formation in South Korea. With chapters exploring the roles of women, students, and church organizations in the struggle, the book reflects Koo's broader interest in the social and cultural dimensions of industrial transformation.
Author: Hagen Koo Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501731777 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Forty years of rapid industrialization have transformed millions of South Korean peasants and their sons and daughters into urban factory workers. Hagen Koo explores the experiences of this first generation of industrial workers and describes its struggles to improve working conditions in the factory and to search for justice in society. The working class in South Korea was born in a cultural and political environment extremely hostile to its development, Koo says. Korean workers forged their collective identity much more rapidly, however, than did their counterparts in other newly industrialized countries in East Asia. This book investigates how South Korea's once-docile and submissive workers reinvented themselves so quickly into a class with a distinct identity and consciousness. Based on sources ranging from workers' personal writings to union reports to in-depth interviews, this book is a penetrating analysis of the South Korean working-class experience. Koo reveals how culture and politics simultaneously suppressed and facilitated class formation in South Korea. With chapters exploring the roles of women, students, and church organizations in the struggle, the book reflects Koo's broader interest in the social and cultural dimensions of industrial transformation.
Author: Ken C. Kawashima Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822392291 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism. Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean “minority,” he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how, when migrant workers did organize—as when they became involved in Rōsō (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyō (the Japanese communist labor union)—their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In The Proletarian Gamble, his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader rethinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.
Author: Jaesok Kim Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804786127 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
Chinese Labor in a Korean Factorydraws on fieldwork in a multinational corporation (MNC) in Qingdao, China, and delves deep into the power dynamics at play between Korean management, Chinese migrant workers, local-level Chinese government officials, and Chinese local gangs. Anthropologist Jaesok Kim examines how governments, to attract MNCs, relinquish parts of their legal rights over these entities, while MNCs also give up portions of their rights as proxies of global capitalism by complying with local government guidelines to ensure infrastructure and cheap labor. This ethnography demonstrates how a particular MNC struggled with the pressure to be increasingly profitable while negotiating the clash of Korean and Chinese cultures, traditions, and classes on the factory floor of a garment corporation. Chinese Labor in a Korean Factory pays particular attention to common features of post-socialist countries. By analyzing the contentious collaboration between foreign management, factory workers, government officials, and gangs, this study contributes not only to the research on the politics of resistance but also to how global and local forces interact in concrete and surprising ways.
Author: Boye Lafayette De Mente Publisher: Tuttle Publishing ISBN: 1462900674 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 169
Book Description
South Korean companies and technology have suddenly conquered the world. Samsung, Hyundai and LG are industry leaders and the global brands. Korean culture in the form of K-Pop music videos and "Korean Wave" films and TV dramas are watched everywhere from Tel Aviv to Singapore to Rio. Korean gourmet food trucks ply the streets of New York and LA, and kimchi has found a place on the shelves of well-stocked supermarkets around the world. With just a fraction of Japan's land area, less than half its population, and no natural resources--how have Korean companies managed to conquer the world in such a short period of time? What is the "secret sauce" of Korean business practices and companies that makes them so successful? To find out, readers need more than statistics and company profiles. Learning the basics about Korean culture, about Korean social etiquette and Korean business culture, will enable you to understand for the first time how Koreans think and why they work so effectively to achieve their goals. This understanding will enhance your own effectiveness in doing business with Koreans, or in competing with them--whether in Korea or elsewhere.
Author: Cheehyung Harrison Kim Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231546092 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
In search of national unity and state control in the decade following the Korean War, North Korea turned to labor. Mandating rapid industrial growth, the government stressed order and consistency in everyday life at both work and home. In Heroes and Toilers, Cheehyung Harrison Kim offers an unprecedented account of life and labor in postwar North Korea that brings together the roles of governance and resistance. Kim traces the state’s pursuit of progress through industrialism and examines how ordinary people challenged it every step of the way. Even more than coercion or violence, he argues, work was crucial to state control. Industrial labor was both mode of production and mode of governance, characterized by repetitive work, mass mobilization, labor heroes, and the insistence on convergence between living and working. At the same time, workers challenged and reconfigured state power to accommodate their circumstances—coming late to work, switching jobs, fighting with bosses, and profiting from the black market, as well as following approved paths to secure their livelihood, resolve conflict, and find happiness. Heroes and Toilers is a groundbreaking analysis of postwar North Korea that avoids the pitfalls of exoticism and exceptionalism to offer a new answer to the fundamental question of North Korea’s historical development.
Author: Hwasook Nam Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501758276 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 426
Book Description
Women in the Sky examines Korean women factory workers' century-long activism, from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on gender politics both in the labor movement and in the larger society. It highlights several key moments in colonial and postcolonial Korean history when factory women commanded the attention of the wider public, including the early-1930s rubber shoe workers' general strike in Pyongyang, the early-1950s textile workers' struggle in South Korea, the 1970s democratic union movement led by female factory workers, and women workers' activism against neoliberal restructuring in recent decades. Hwasook Nam asks why women workers in South Korea have been relegated to the periphery in activist and mainstream narratives despite a century of persistent militant struggle and indisputable contributions to the labor movement and successful democracy movement. Women in the Sky opens and closes with stories of high-altitude sit-ins—a phenomenon unique to South Korea—beginning with the rubber shoe worker Kang Churyong's sit-in in 1931 and ending with numerous others in today's South Korean labor movement, including that of Kim Jin-Sook. In Women in the Sky, Nam seeks to understand and rectify the vast gap between the crucial roles women industrial workers played in the process of Korea's modernization and their relative invisibility as key players in social and historical narratives. By using gender and class as analytical categories, Nam presents a comprehensive study and rethinking of the twentieth-century nation-building history of Korea through the lens of female industrial worker activism.
Author: KyungHee Kim Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443870269 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
Working hours in Korea are considerably longer than those of most other countries throughout the world. The 40 hour workweek was eventually introduced in 2005, meaning that many people were finally no longer legally obliged to work on Saturdays or Sundays. Despite expectations that this legislation would have a remarkable impact on both society and each individual, Korea is still one of the highest ranked OECD countries in terms of the length of working hours. The reduced working hours have been filled with ‘overwork’ on weekdays or weekends. Given the large amount of time Koreans dedicate to work, concerns regarding leisure time and expenditure on leisure products are becoming increasingly significant. This book evolved from the initial questions ‘why do Koreans work so hard for long hours?’ and ‘don’t the Korean working population want to spend time on leisure?’, and comes to the conclusion that the lengthy working hours have a major impact on the ability of average Koreans to participate in leisure activities. In the process of solving its initial research questions, this book explores the historical formation of the working class, the labour market, and the relationship between work and leisure and leisure policy. It also conducts various forms of empirical research, such as questionnaire survey and interviews, and uses a range of different research methods, including case studies, comparative historical analysis and secondary data analysis. As such, this book will undoubtedly appeal to anyone wishing to understand more about Korean society, and to anyone with an interest in how a wide variety of research methods are brought together in real world research.
Author: Kevin Gray Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134112319 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
One of the most remarkable aspects of South Korea’s transition from impoverished post-colonial nation to fully-fledged industrialized democracy has been the growth of its independent and dynamic labour movement. Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation examines current trends and transformations within the Korean labour movement since the 1990s. It has been a common assumption that the ‘third wave’ of democratisation, the end of the Cold War, and the spread of neoliberal globalisation in the latter part of the 20th century have helped to create an environment in which organised labour is better placed to overcome bureaucratic national unionism and transform itself into a potential counter-globalisation movement. However, Kevin Gray argues that despite the apparent continued phenomena of labour militancy and the rhetoric of anti-neoliberalism, the mainstream independent labour movement in Korea has become increasingly institutionalised and bureaucratised into the new capitalist democracy. This process is demonstrated by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions’ experience of participation in various forms of policy making forums. Gray suggests that as a result, the KCTU has failed to mount an effective challenge against processes of neoliberal restructuring and concomitant social polarisation. The Korean experience provides an excellent case study for understanding the relationship between organised labour and globalisation. Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation will appeal to students and scholars of Korean studies and International Political Economy, as well as Asian politics and economics.
Author: Jennifer Jihye Chun Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801457211 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 245
Book Description
The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.
Author: Janice C. H. Kim Publisher: ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Linking economic and social historical research methods with special reference to the evolution of the industrial labor force, To Live to Work offers an account of the popular expansion of gender, labor, and political consciousnesses among working women in colonial Korea. While Korea's rapid industrial development throughout the twentieth century is one focus of this work, equal emphasis is given to interpreting the social and cultural consequences of modernization, such as the growth of cities and the rise of male and female labor forces. Special attention is given to the partitions in the labor market along the lines of gender, age, class, and nationality.
Author: Hagen Koo
Author: Hagen Koo
Author: Ken C. Kawashima
Author: Jaesok Kim
Author: Boye Lafayette De Mente
Author: Cheehyung Harrison Kim
Author: Hwasook Nam
Author: KyungHee Kim
Author: Kevin Gray
Author: Jennifer Jihye Chun
Author: Janice C. H. Kim