In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ideology backed by Rhee, the propertied class, and the U.S. Military Government in Korea.55 After heated discussions and several attempted revisions, a watered-down version of the article on profit sharing actually made it into the Constitution, although the article on workers’ participation in management did not.56 After many compromises the final version of the Constitution was promulgated in July 1948. The finalized version of the article on labor reads as follows: “Article 18. (1) The freedom of workers to organize, collectively bargain, and conduct collective action shall be guaranteed within the scope set by law. (2) Workers in profit-seeking private enterprises shall have the right to share equally in the distribution of profit as provided by law.”57 Thus were labor’s three basic rights and a right to profit sharing, “within the scope set by law,” enshrined in the constitution of the land. The fact that organized labor’s voice was reflected in the Constitution against the vehement opposition of the business community and conservative political forces tells us much about the political environment and the power of progressive discourses on the labor question in 1948. The constitutional outcome of these debates also alerts us to the relatively weak position held by the capitalist class and its liberal capitalist ideology, and the organizational and political weakness of the combined forces of Rhee and the KDP in support of the capitalist path to nation building in South Korea at that particular juncture. Rhee and the conservative forces struck back in full force beginning in 1949, however. Most vocal members of the “junior assemblymen” group were arrested as pro–North Korean communist agents. The National Security Law was pushed through the National Assembly, in a context of red-baiting and right-wing terror . Finally, the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 severely limited already confined political space for the “progressives.” An extreme right-wing, anticommunist dictatorial system was consolidated under Rhee’s direction, mainly based on the coercive power of the police, the army, and various paramilitary youth groups. Soon the Taehan Noch’ong, having fallen from the progressive heights manifested during the constitutional debates, also became part of the machinery of the dictatorial regime, obediently playing the role of mobilizing workers for Syngman Rhee. THE LABOR LAWS OF 1953 The set of labor laws that passed the National Assembly in the early months of 1953, before the Korean War ended, created the basic institutional framework 48 T H E E A R L Y 1 9 5 0 S that governed South Korean industrial relations during the second half of the twentieth century, even though many provisions of the laws were routinely violated with impunity by many companies, especially under Rhee’s rule. The fundamental problem South Korean labor had with this legal industrial relations framework was not that the laws lacked necessary provisions protecting labor, but that the state more often than not did not possess the will to seriously enforce them. The essential legacy of the laws, however, was that, enforced or not, they have provided crucial legitimacy for trade union demands to substantiate the ideals expressed in them. It is important to remember that even with numerous regressive revisions after 1953, which generally added more restrictions and state control on the exercise of labor rights, the three labor rights enshrined in the South Korean Constitution—rights to organize unions freely, bargain collectively , and engage in collective actions—were never revoked in principle. And as it turned out, the legal and constitutional framework guaranteeing labor rights could function as an invaluable, albeit fragile, shield on occasions, protecting workers conducting organizing or strike activities from repression and red-baiting under successive anticommunist regimes. Considering the chilling ideological effects of the Korean War and the entrenchment of the right-wing anticommunist politics of the Rhee regime, the labor laws of 1953 were quite progressive. But conventional understanding of these laws regards them as another modern import from the United States, which had nothing to do with the real conditions of labor-capital relations in South Korea at the time and which were not intended to be implemented. In recent decades most labor activists and labor scholars have assumed that the laws were a sham and that labor during the 1950s was a mere political tool for Rhee.58 Nevertheless , some scholars, like Sin Illyŏng, have rejected the conventional argument that the laws were “nothing more than a decorative thing copied from those...

Share