Research Topics: Feminization Of Trade Union

Feminization of Trade Union: South Korea and The Netherlands

Feminization of Trade Union: South Korea and The Netherlands   In Korea, a disproportionately large number of women workers are employed in unprotected non-regular jobs, while their male counterparts hold relatively secure and high-wage regular jobs. The trade union movement in Korea is exclusively organized at the enterprise level and there is a decentralized collective bargaining structure. Korea stands out in a crowd of OECD countries as one of the worst cases of gender gap in employment. Despite high GDP per capita and high rates of education, women’s labor force participation rates and gender earning rations in Korea are among the lowest. Korea also has the common trait that employment rates of women with college degrees are lower than the rates of less educated women. In every other OECD countries employment rates are generally much higher and the gender gap lower among women with college degrees than among women without them. Korea has very high rates of female workers in nonstandard employment arrangements, compares to the OECD average. This is partly due to the fact that tradition of lifetime employment with companies make it difficult fro women workers to reenter labor force after their reproductive activities. As a result, these women workers usually experience severe career interruption during their childrearing age, and they are segregated into the nonstandard forms of employment. Almost 70 percent of Korean women workers were either temporary or part-time workers in 2002. Culture and social norms play an important role in this labor force scenario. Social pressure to not work when marri4d has led to lower fertility rates, as working women postponed marriage and children, and at the same time, women bore most of the nonmarket work, such as unpaid family work and childrearing.             This is also happening in the Netherlands where mothers with children are expected to stay at home, and they rarely work full-time. Underdeveloped childcare also forced Dutch mothers either to take part-time jobs to remain childless. The traditional gender pattern is very string with women constituting a majority of part-time wage earners. The proportion of Dutch women in part-time and temporary employment arrangements is over 70 percent, which is even higher than that of Korean women. A deeper comparison between these countries, however, reveals surprisingly different patterns of employment arrangements. There is a stronger preferences for part-time work in the part of both men and women in the Netherlands than in other countries. Although it is still mainly women who hold part-time jobs, in 1998, 18 percent of employed males worked part-time compared with 6 percent in the 15 EU countries. Even more significant is the fact that while part-time employment has rapidly increased, average hours of work of full-time workers have decreased. As a result, the distinction between full-time and part-time jobs gets more and more blurred, with working time remaining as the only significant difference. The reduction of men’s working time is supposed to change the family division of labor and women’s labor market participation behavior. In the Netherlands, fathers of young children are entitled to reduced hours, and thus 13 percent of fathers with children switched temporarily to a 4-day week in 1994. In sum, despite a clearly gendered pattern of part-time employment in the Netherlands, the gender gap in employment status is being narrowed. Two interrelated factors helped the Netherlands to bring such changes in employment relations. First of all, the Dutch government has passed several influential laws that regulated and protected part-time work, and improved flexibility of full-time jobs. Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com

Feminization of Trade Union: South Korea and The Netherlands

Feminization of Trade Union: South Korea and The Netherlands In Korea, a disproportionately large number of women workers are ...