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a housing allowance, which is more than the monthly base wage, and various other allowances, including allowances for skill level and responsibility, accounting , worker-supplied tools, worker efficiency, overtime, overnight work, and holiday work.52 The wartime allowance was discontinued in the 1960 pay schedule, but other allowances such as one for the Harvest Moon ancestral ceremony wine money and a winterizing allowance appeared. The consumer price allowance, which was a whopping ten times that of the monthly base wage, was limited only to white-collar employees. The list reveals that job-related allowances based on the characteristics of work or work environments were not emphasized in these wage determination schemes. Bonuses, supposedly to be given as an incentive to workers with a good performance record, were distributed across the board just like other allowances in the 1950s.53 Increasingly, management tried to use allowances pegged to productivity so that “people who work more would get paid more.”54 In 1964 a three-tiered efficiency allowance for production workers was introduced except for foremen.55 Workers apparently did not like the new scheme. In 1965 the union called for the abolition of the efficiency allowance at a meeting of the union steering committee members and the board members: “The efficiency allowance is very unfair and is causing revolts on the shop floor. Some even call it the ‘who-you-know’ allowance. We demand that it be evenly divided and added to wages.”56 In the end the union was able to repeal it and replace it by a fixed-amount “encouragement allowance.”57 The company also tried to peg bonus payments to efficiency in 1965. According to the new scheme, bonuses would be based on group performance (ranked A, B, C, or D) and then adjusted by individual performance. Again, the union let the new bonus scheme fizzle out without ever being implemented.58 The effort to introduce a piecework system in the foundry in 1965 also failed when foundry workers protested it with a spontaneous work stoppage.59 Even though KSEC workers, like workers in other places and times, were suspicious of piecework pay, the union fell short of opposing the piecework system itself. Instead, it demanded a reduction in the base tonnage the company had set, a level determined by standard eight-hour-day output. Beyond that level, a 50 percent incentive pay would be added. The union also wanted wages for holidays and weekly and monthly vacation days to be paid regardless of the fulfillment of the base tonnage. The resulting piecework system, a mere ghost of the original plan, was abandoned soon afterward. Promotion was another area of contention. Regular promotion practice did not take root at the yard until the union demanded it and management agreed 126 R A T I O N A L I Z A T I O N A N D R E S I S T A N C E to it in 1965.60 The 1967 pay schedule set evaluations for salary-class promotion to occur four times a year. Promotion in rank was a more complicated matter because the rank system frequently and radically changed at the yard during the 1960s, making its implementation extremely difficult. Until 1968 production workers were classified into semiskilled, skilled, second-rank-specially-skilled, and first-rank-specially-skilled workers.61 Different rules for promotion applied to each group. After 1964, however, mounting pressure from workers inflated workers’ ranks across the board, resulting in a heavy concentration in the two top categories.62 Finally, the four-rank classification and accompanying rank promotion system were abolished in 1968.63 Severance pay, introduced during the colonial period, became a customary practice at large companies in South Korea. In 1931, 80 factories and 12 mines out of 1,199 factories and 213 mines, which employed ten or more workers on a regular basis, had severance pay provisions.64 In the 1950s large companies under state management and banking institutions developed a practice of providing severance pay on a progressive scale. For example, the KSEC paid a leaving employee one and a half times his or her monthly wage per year of service if the employee had five to fewer than ten years of seniority. If the worker had worked ten or more years at the yard, he or she would get two times the monthly wage per year of service. Severance pay was not simply a sum paid to compensate a severance but a kind of...

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