1987 System

Two events of 1987

The concept of the 1987 System binds two events of that year into a single structure. One was the June Democratic Uprising, in which the demand for a constitutional amendment restoring direct presidential elections spread into mass protest, drew the ruling party's declaration of acceptance on 29 June, and was institutionalized in the October amendment establishing direct elections and a single five-year term. The other was the Great Workers' Struggle from July to September, in which more than three thousand labour disputes broke out within two months and large numbers of new unions were formed.

How the two combined defined the character of the regime. Political democratization was institutionalized in constitutional amendment and electoral law, while the gains in the labour sphere were institutionalized in the form of enterprise unions and enterprise-level bargaining. With no framework of industrial bargaining or social pacts, a structure emerged in which bargaining power at the level of the individual firm determined the distribution of gains.

Economic content

Political transition and economic opening proceeded at the same time. Trade and capital market liberalization in the late 1980s and globalization policy through the 1990s widened market opening while the structure of chaebol-led growth remained in place. That democratization did not extend into a reorganization of economic power is the central argument of this characterization.

The currency crisis of 1997 was the dividing point. Restructuring, the introduction of dismissal for managerial reasons, and the legalization of dispatched labour institutionalized labour-market flexibilization, and non-regular employment expanded rapidly. Under enterprise-level bargaining the bargaining power of regular workers at large firms was preserved while workers outside them had no representative body, so inequality inside the working class widened structurally.

Crisis discourse

From the 2000s the phrase came to be used as the name of a crisis rather than of an achievement. In politics the constraints created by the presidential system, the two-party configuration, and the single five-year term became objects of constitutional debate, while in labour the limits of enterprise unionism and militant economism became the focus of argument.

The characterization itself is also criticized. One line concerns periodization: whether the changes after 1997 are a continuation of the 1987 System or the establishment of a different regime. Another holds that the concept, in binding the distinct levels of politics, economy, and labour into one system, obscures the dynamics specific to each. The 1987 System nonetheless functions as common vocabulary for discussing the structural conditions of South Korean society.