Korean Skilled Workers: Toward a Labor Aristocracy by Hyung-A Kim (review)

Abstract

“Nothing prospers,” Sophocles writes, “without pain and toil.”1 While South Korea’s spectacular rise to economic world prominence in the late twentieth century owes much to its strong developmental state headed by former army general Park Chung Hee 朴正熙, who seized political power in a military coup d’état in May 1961, neither the state’s aggressive export regime that drove the economy during those years nor its astonishing statistical achievements can be comprehended without reference to the composition and competitiveness of the country’s labor force. In an earlier book, Hyung-A Kim examines the dynamic triumvirate in the presidential Blue House consisting of Park, his chief-of-staff Kim Chŏngnyŏm 金正濂, and second economic secretary O Wŏnch’ŏl 吳源哲, who together under Park’s leadership presided over the state’s vast Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) project in the 1970s.2 Now in a new book based on a trove of archival and unpublished materials, extensive interviews with many key figures, and an impressive utilization of Korean and other secondary sources, Kim focuses on another crucial part of the development story, the rise of a skilled labor force, taking the narrative beyond the Park years to explore its many twists, turns, and implications. Chapter 1 opens the story in the 1970s with the creation of what Park calls “industrial warriors” (sanŏp chŏnsa 産業戰士), a technically trained and skilled workforce, without whom the move from light industry, based largely on cheap, unskilled labor, to capitaland technology-intensive HCI could not be accomplished. From the onset of Park’s rule, HCI had always been an ultimate vision. But it was not until the early 1970s that the practical economic and financial foundations were in place to pursue this vision. By then the HCI idea had become intertwined in Park’s mind with a massive upgrading of the