The participation of married women in the labour market has been increasing since industrialization in the  s in Korea; in  it overtook that of unmarried women. This raises the issue of how women reconcile paid and unpaid work and how state policy responds to this issue. In Korea, there have been numerous policy reforms designed to support working women in combining work and family life. For example, a parental leave scheme was introduced in  and maternity benefits were also introduced in  . However, it is doubtful whether these policies can be effective in practice in Korea, where Confucian traditions in respect of women's roles remain strong. Confucian tradition has long influenced Korean society culturally and socially. Although Korean society today is not as Confucian as in the past, some traditions still remain strong, particularly with regard to the family: for example filial piety, seniority, the married woman's responsibility for her parents-in-law. This paper will argue that Confucian tradition makes for difficulties in Korean women's experiences of reconciling paid and unpaid work and also affects the formation of state policy. The paper explores the impact of the Confucian welfare regimes on Korean women's experience of reconciling paid and unpaid care work, and questions the gendered characteristics of the Confucian welfare state.

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This article draws on Kelly's mobilization theory to identify potential stages in developing gendered collective articulation of grievances and discusses the barriers to such articulation within two case sites in the UK telecommunications sector. It focuses on employee concerns surrounding pay and working time issues arising from organizational change in two case studies from the UK telecommunications sector. Findings showed that organizational change had brought work intensification that exacerbated long hours cultures and that concerns were common to both sexes, although organizational variations in career ambitions and sense of entitlement occurred. In contrast, there was evidence that women were less willing to articulate concerns over unfair pay practices, shaped partly by a low sense of entitlement and also perceived weaknesses in potential for collective redress. The activation of grievances was severely limited by the gendered occupational and organizational structure of both workplaces and union organization within them. We conclude that there are opportunities for unions Journal of Industrial Relations 718 to pursue a two-pronged approach to worker mobilization by mainstreaming concerns about working time that are common to workers of both sexes with families and to activate gendered concerns around pay at workplace level.

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