Summary and Conclusions

Abstract

The previous chapters on individual employment relationships, collective industrial relations, and work organization used data from the first to third waves of the Korea Labor Institute’s Workplace Panel Survey (WPS) to describe Korean employment relationships in the latter half of the 2000s and to examine changes in the employment relationship from 2005 to 2009. We found, among the many dimensions of the employment relationship, that collective industrial relations changed not according to fluctuations in the economic cycle but in line with gradual and consistent trends. By contrast, changes to other dimensions of the employment relationship such as proportion of non-regular workers, education and training, working hours, and workplace innovation could neither be definitively labeled a consistent trend nor a temporary jolt induced by the 2008 global economic crisis. However, it is clear that some of these aspects had undergone temporary changes as is evidenced in the analysis of data on working hours reported in the WPS Supplementary Survey.