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Blue-collar work force going gray

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Coyner’s Comment

The ancillary but highly relevant issue to the below is the large body of unemployed and under-employed young Koreans, almost all with some kind of secondary education (of remarkably varied quality levels).

I recall researching this Korean phenomenon in my microeconomic class at the USC Marshall School of Business in the late 1980s. At that time, the major disparity was linked to class and not to age. Back then, the rise of the middle class meant that almost all male and very many female offspring were making it through secondary education with postgraduate expectations of not getting their hands dirty through employment. Ergo, many blue-collar jobs were left often vacant and white-collar jobs overly sought.

Today, a generation later, we see the logical manifestation of this phenomenon. That is, those Koreans willing to take blue-collar jobs are retiring. At the same time, some of these graying workers have formed militant labor unions whose leaders seemed to have defined reality back in the 1980s and have been unwilling/unable to move on. The net-net result is the Korean manufacturing sector is hollowing out with Korean companies making products abroad rather than at home.

One may argue this is economic evolution, with the Korean economy climbing its way up the development totem pole. However, if one looks at the more recent examples of Japan and the U.S., one can see those nations’ companies – at least some of them – pulling back production from overseas and putting the same into domestic plants for a variety of pragmatic reasons.

The open question is whether Korean companies will ever reverse this trend. And in the meantime, what will be the economic and political impact of large numbers of under-employed South Koreans. The official unemployment figures are hugely misleading given it takes only the smallest of part-time work for bureaucrats to count those people as being not unemployed.

In any case, the below article defines what I consider to be a major “sleeper” of an economic issue the South Koreans will have to contend during the coming decade.

Blue-collar work force going gray

Shortage of young workers may portend manufacturing decline

BY Kim Young-Hoon and Kim Young-Min
Korea JoongAng Daily
Sept. 10, 2013

http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2977353


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