South Korea: Dissent Within the Economic Miracle (review)

146BOOK REVIEWS that an overwhelming majority of Korean immigrants are found in other spheres of occupational life. Like the Chinese laundrymen of earlier generations , Koreans may find themselves regarded as deviant if they work as professionals, bankers, or carpenters. In this respect, Kim Ilsoo's The New Urban Immigrants gives a more balanced picture of the Korean community (in New York). To be fair to Light and Bonacich, it is true that this book is really about immigrant entrepreneurs, and only secondarily about Koreans. But it nevertheless needs to be emphasized that ethnic entrepreneurship occupies only a minority of recent Asian immigrants to the U.S., and therefore the authors' theory is somewhat limited in scope. With these qualifications, however, I strongly recommend this work to those interested in Koreans in the United States, and to scholars of immigration adjustment in general. Herbert Barringer University of Hawaii at Manoa South Korea: Dissent Within the Economic Miracle, by George E. Ogle. London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 1990. This is a beautifully written book about the Korean workers' struggles for economic and social justice under the shadow of the Korean economic miracle. Everyone would agree that South Korea's economic success would not have been possible without Korean workers' hard work. And most people also know that the labor situations in South Korean industries are far from satisfactory and that the Korean government has taken an exceptionally repressive approach to labor control. Yet, despite so many success stories written about South Korea's economic growth, one has to search hard through obscure journals and magazine articles to find the same story written from the perspective of workers. Several dissertations have been written in the United States recently, but hardly any systematic account of the Korean labor situation has been available, at least not in an easily accessible form. (One exception is Jang-Jip Choi's book, Labor and the Authoritarian State, published by Korea University Press in 1989.) Now, we have a book long awaited, written by a person who could not be more qualified for the job. George Ogle was a priest and a BOOK REVIEWS147 codirector of the Urban Industrial Mission in Inchon, an organization which has played a critical role in helping workers organize independent unions from the 1960s. As can be expected from the author's background , this is not a mere academic analysis of the Korean labor movement, but an account written with deep humanistic concern for the workers' sufferings and genuine desire for seeing a significant improvement in Korean labor relations. At the same time, this is also not an inflammatory radical attack on those who exploit or control labor, the type of writings conservative readers would quickly drop. This is a serious analysis of why the very structure that brought about spectacular economic achievement in South Korea entailed such a high degree of repression and mistreatment of the workers and, in consequence, led to violent labor struggles over the past two decades. In a relatively thin book, the author provides a highly informative account of the development of the Korean labor movement from the colonial period to the most recent period. Much of what has been practiced during the recent period of rapid industrialization was established during the Japanese colonial period, including a heavy reliance on the police and other security agencies for labor control, the authoritarian, class-based attitudes toward the workers, and control of organized labor through government-controlled unions. But a more fundamental factor which the author emphasizes throughout the book is the essentially antilabor attitude deeply ingrained in the minds of the political and economic leaders, the "innovators" who led the export-driven industrialization during the past three decades. "Though labor as the crucial ingredient in economic planning and production was extolled in warm tones, the laborer as a person and unions as organizations of those persons were anathema. While seeking in good conscience to develop the nation and save it from poverty, the innovators exhibited a pervasive hostility against workers and workers organizations" (p. 47). This point is amply demonstrated through detailed descriptions of several major attempts by the workers to organize independent unions from the 1970s through the 1980s, and...