Globalization and industrial relations in Korea

The impact of globalization on industrial relations can be understood as the combination of two sets of interrelated factors: the contextual factors that effect the national economy and industrial relations on a national level, and the factors of government policies formed in a globalizing context for enhancing the competitiveness of the national economy. Globalization has change Korean industrial relations in the 1990s, to a certain extent. At the national level, a social dialogue system of tripartite policy consultation has been implemented as a means to deal with the challenges of globalization. Enterprise-level industrial relations have shifted from wage-focused and labor- offensive relations to employment-focused and labor-defensive relations, and this has been accompanied by an increase in labor-management confrontations and the organizational reconfiguring. Moreover, the recent years of globalization have witnessed the growing presence of not only the marginal workforce but also foreign-invested companies, both of which have created new battlegrounds in Korean industrial relations. It is concluded that Korean industrial relations, confronted with the ever-growing challenges of globalization, have entered in to an era of uncertainty.