Doctoral Dissertation Research: Emergence and Persistence of Labor Market Dualism

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project will examine the processes leading to the worldwide emergence and persistence of labor market dualism. The growth of labor market dualism has become the subject of widespread debate in the scholarly and policy literature, with the existing literature focusing either on formal workers or informal/precarious workers. This project, in contrast, focuses on the interaction between these two groups of workers, providing fresh insights into the institutionalization and limits of polarized employment systems. By conducting a comparative analysis of four industries in post-1987 South Korea with divergent outcomes, this project will help identify the specific conditions facilitating (or impeding) dualism, and assist policymakers in finding solutions to the problems of precarious work and workplace inequality. This project addresses unanswered questions in the academic debate between the proponents of the "revitalization" thesis and the "dualization" thesis about the origins and limits of precarious work. The proponents of the revitalization thesis have argued that precarious workers are being empowered by ongoing economic transformations, creating the preconditions for them to organize and make demands for better wages and job security on their own behalf. By contrast, the proponents of the dualization thesis have suggested that micro-corporatist compromises between formal workers and employers have created insurmountable obstacles for the effective self-organization of precarious workers, thereby facilitating the long-term entrenchment of labor dualism. Through a comparison of four industries--textiles, electronics, automobile and shipbuilding-this project will assess the validity of these two hypotheses. The research conducted for this project will include (1) identifying the divergent patterns of labor dualism in the four industries since 1987; (2) creating and analyzing a new database of protests by formal and precarious workers in these four industries since 1987; and (3) conducting a narrative analysis in order to illuminate the causal mechanisms linking industrial structure, labor dualism, and the agency of both precarious and formal workers.