Inequality in the Workplace

The past several decades have seen widespread reform of labor markets across advanced industrial countries, but most of the existing research on job security, wage bargaining, and social protection is based on the experience of the United States and Western Europe. In Inequality in the Workplace, Jiyeoun Song focuses on South Korea and Japan, which have advanced labor market reform and confronted the rapid rise of a split in labor markets between protected regular workers and underprotected and underpaid nonregular workers.

The two countries have implemented very different strategies in response to the pressure to increase labor market flexibility during economic downturns. Japanese policy makers, Song finds, have relaxed the rules and regulations governing employment and working conditions for part-time, temporary, and fixed-term contract employees while retaining extensive protections for full-time permanent workers. In Korea, by contrast, politicians have weakened employment protections for all categories of workers.

In her comprehensive survey of the politics of labor market reform in East Asia, Song argues that institutional features of the labor market shape the national trajectory of reform. More specifically, she shows how the institutional characteristics of the employment protection system and industrial relations, including the size and strength of labor unions, determine the choice between liberalization for the nonregular workforce and liberalization for all as well as the degree of labor market inequality in the process of reform.

Jiyeoun Song is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea.

Song’s expertise in the labor market relations of the region she studies is apparent throughout, and she offers an informative and instructive account of the experiences of Japan and Korea. Overall, Song’s book is a fundamental contribution to the body of literature on labor markets in Japan and Korea, and it offers an interesting new approach to the most recent reform processes in those two countries.

The economic and social institutions in Japan and Korea seem more similar to each other than to institutions in Europe or the U.S. In this book, however,the author reveals that the two countries respond in different ways to similar pressures of labour market reform.... The major accomplishments of this book include its revealing the emergence of different paths from the same pressures, especially the divergence of the internal labour markets in Japan and Korea even though we might have expected similar outcomes in those two countries.

Song's systematic, comparative analysis provides a nuanced understanding of the institutional constraints that policy makers and firms face when responding to economic crisis and change. Researchers studying the institutional causes and consequences of labor market polarization will find this book essential reading.

Song's Inequality in the Workplace makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the politics of labor market reform in under-researched places such as Japan and Korea. In a broader theoretical perspective, this comparative study also highlights the effects of preexisting institutions and the policy outcomes they bring about several decades.