Korean Workers

Within about four decades, South Korea's rapid industrialization turned millions of farmers and their children into city factory hands. Hagen Koo follows this first generation of industrial laborers as they press for better conditions on the shop floor and seek fairness in the wider society.

Koo argues that the country's working class emerged under cultural and political conditions that openly resisted it. Even so, Korean workers built a collective identity far faster than laborers in other newly industrializing East Asian nations. The book asks how a workforce once considered compliant and deferential came to see itself as a class with its own identity and outlook in so short a time.

Drawing on workers' own writings, union records and extensive interviews, the study offers a detailed look at the Korean labor experience. Koo shows how culture and politics at once held back and enabled the formation of the working class.