Despite the gradual increase in the female labour market activity rate in most of the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the rate has been stagnant in the Republic of Korea. The low female employment rate in Korea also reflects the withdrawal of a majority of women at the time of marriage or childbirth, resulting in an M-shaped pattern. The discourse on social investment attracted much attention from the Kim Dae-Jung Government (1998-2003 and was more facilitated from the mid-2000s towards the later period of the Roh Moo-Hyun Government (2003-08). Against this background and along with a frantic focus on the low fertility rate from the mid-2000s, the government has expanded expenditure on family policy. In this article, we analyze social investment policies related to female employment and discuss their effect on promoting Korean women to work. We first closely examine the Korean female labour market in three aspects: precarious employment pattern; career breaks; and under-employment. Based on our policy analysis, we suggest that there is a mismatch in implemented policy and policy preference. Lastly, this article questions how effective social investment policies can be without a consideration of changes in job quality in the Korean female labour market.

Selecting Korea as one of the conceptually classified East Asian welfare states, this paper aims to empirically investigate the determinants of Korean welfare state development. Linking the research question with the lively discussion on welfare state in Korea that is taking place domestically, this paper also aims to examine whether the development of the Korean welfare state has been influenced by politics of the left or by industrialization with functionalistic perspectives. We conduct an analysis first by regression analysis and then fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the conditions of such development. A Korean Welfare State Dataset (KWSD) has been newly included in the Comparative Welfare State Dataset (CWSD) and we used this new dataset for our empirical analysis. Our empirical findings suggest that, at least up to the current point, factors other than economic development or industrialization are not robust enough to make a claim of a take-off of the Korean welfare state from its developmental stage. However, we also notice the influence of the left government and suggest that it is legitimate to expect an innovative change in the path of the Korean welfare state once the power resource theory is applicable.

The paper investigates policy conditions for high rates of non-standard employment in Korea and Japan exploiting fs/QCA (fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis). We first review the previous literature on labor market risks and discuss the advantages of taking a configurational approach in investigating policies related to increase of non-standard workers. Secondly, non-standard employment in Korea and Japan are examined more closely in comparison with other OECD countries. In case of Korea, a low level of statutory minimum wage in combination with strict employment protection legislation for permanent workers is suggested as the sufficient condition for high rate of non-standard employment rate. In case of Japan, a low level of statutory minimum wage in combination with weak employment protection legislations for temporary workers is suggested to lead to a high level of non-standard employment rate. We empirically test which policy configurations cause high rate of non-standard employment and discuss (i) the importance of examining multiple policies together and (ii) that there can be different pathways to the same outcome.

In South Korea, many struggles of non-regular workers, who attempted to organize their unions and engage in militant action to protest against employers’ inhumane discrimination and illegal exclusion, have failed to achieve the desired outcomes, due to their vulnerable employment status and their lack of action resources. In this light, our study examines the conditions that lead to victory in precarious workers’ struggles, by focusing on three attributes: internal solidarity with regular workers, external solidarity from labour and civil society groups outside the workplace, and mobilized protest repertoires. Specifically, this study seeks to identify the configurations of these three conditions that produce successful outcomes in precarious workers’ struggles, in terms of bargaining gains and organizational sustainability. We do this by employing fs/QCA modelling to examine 30 major cases of non-regular worker struggles occurring over a 16-year period from 1998 to 2013.Our analysis presents the finding that the conditional configuration of strong external solidarity, strong internal solidarity, and fewer struggle repertoires constitutes a significant causal path to successful outcomes. This reaffirms the idea that strong solidarity bridging, whether with regular workers that have a different employment status in the segmented workplace, or with labour and civil society groups outside the workplace, is the crucial causal condition for precarious workers to achieve their desired outcomes from struggle. An unexpected finding, however, is that when precarious worker struggles mobilize fewer struggle repertoires, they are likely to achieve the successful outcomes of bargaining and organizational gains. Our study contributes to the theoretical elaboration of labour movement revitalization for the precariat class, by shedding light on the activism of precarious workers, considering that the English-language literature that pays attention to the active role of such atypical workers in staging protests against employers’ inhumane treatments and the neoliberal labour regime is limited.En Corée du Sud, plusieurs luttes menées par des travailleurs précaires, qui cherchaient à s’organiser en syndicat et à s’engager dans des actions militantes afin de protester contre la discrimination inhumaine et l’exclusion illégale de la part de leurs employeurs, ont échoué dans l’atteinte des objectifs recherchés, à cause justement de leur statut d’emploi vulnérable et d’un manque de ressources. À la lumière de ces constats, notre étude cherche à examiner les conditions dans lesquelles de telles luttes sont susceptibles de conduire à des victoires, en mettant l’accent sur trois caractéristiques : la solidarité interne en milieu de travail à leur égard de la part des salariés réguliers, la solidarité ...

This study examines the re‐entrance of female workers into the Korean labor market. We highlight that women in their 40s have the highest rate of employment among all female workers and that a large proportion of these women are entering into non‐standard employment. In approaching this question, we examine the political economy of this phenomenon by first discussing the demand side of the Korean labor market using the gendering of the varieties of capitalism argument and then the supply side with the work–life balance argument. When examining re‐entrance into the labor market, women with general skills with lower education and higher education both found it more feasible to re‐enter the labor market as non‐standard workers. While work–life balance is a prominent reason for women's choice of opting out of the labor market, work–life balance choice mattered less for women re‐entering the labor market as non‐standard workers in their 40s and 50s but instead firmly based skill formation mattered more. In addition, the retail service industry is suggested to absorb a large number of female workers with lower skill levels who would have had difficulties in re‐entering other male‐oriented companies.