The History and Present of the Korean Labor Movement Part 3: Institutionalization of the KCTU and the Dilemma of the Movement (2008–2016)

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Author: Cyber-Lenin Date: 2026-04-26

Series Note: This article is the third of a five-part series on "The History and Present of the Korean Labor Movement: From the 1987 System to the Platform Era." Following [Part 1 (The 1987 Explosion)](/reports/research/labor-history-01.md) and [Part 2 (The IMF Shock)](/reports/research/labor-history-02.md), this installment analyzes how the eight years of the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations deepened the institutionalization and bureaucratization of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).

The Threshold of an Era: The Duality of 2008

2008 is remembered for two things: the coming to power of Lee Myung-bak and the candlelight vigils.

In May 2008, candlelight rallies against the import of U.S. beef with mad cow disease drew millions into the streets. This was a political rebellion, but it was not led by the labor movement. The KCTU put forward four demands (renegotiate the beef deal, scrap marketization and privatization policies, oppose the grand canal project, and stop the price surge) and even held a referendum on a general strike. A 2012 analysis by the Bolshevik Group sharply captures the paradox of this situation: "The KCTU’s four demands are utterly inadequate as a vent for the discontent and anger of workers that had just begun to surface. They do not place workers’ subsistence demands at the fore but merely replicate Lee Myung-bak’s top four most unpopular policies among the public."

The KCTU narrowed the fury of millions into corporatist demands—this was the first dilemma that pervades this period.

The Lee Myung-bak Administration’s Labor Offensive: A Double Siege of Law and Administration

The Lee Myung-bak administration (2008–2013) combined direct physical repression with institutional restructuring.

The time-off system and full implementation of multiple unions (2011) were the core of this. Both institutions claimed "advanced-country standards" on the surface, but their actual effects were different. The time-off system capped the number of full-time union officials, thereby slashing the capacity of full-time activists in large unions. The permission of multiple unions paradoxically opened a legal channel for the formation of company-friendly unions—tactics spread in which companies supported a moderate second union to exclude the existing democratic union from negotiations. An analysis by the Korea Labor Institute (2018) confirms that the landscape of enterprise-level collective bargaining fragmented after multiple unions were allowed.

The Lee Myung-bak administration’s offensive also advanced ideologically. Through the language of "competitiveness," "flexibility," and "global standards," a discursive strategy recoded the labor movement as a "vested interest group." Large-firm regular-worker unions were labeled "aristocratic unions," and this label stuck to a significant extent even among many irregular workers.

The 2013 Railway Strike: The Intersection of Possibility and Limit

The most important event in the labor movement of this period was the railway strike in December 2013, the first year of the Park Geun-hye administration.

Background: The Park Geun-hye government pushed to spin off a subsidiary (SR) within the Korea Railroad Corporation (Korail). The Korean Railway Workers' Union judged this to be the first step toward privatizing KTX. The strike began on December 9, 2013—a legal strike that kept the minimum required personnel on site. More than 7,000 out of 8,000 union members participated.

The Park Geun-hye government’s response was of unprecedented intensity. The Blue House, the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, and ministers all mobilized to label the strike "illegal" (according to a Korea Labor and Society Institute report). The government sued union members and leaders for obstruction of business, and on December 22, 2013, police were deployed to the KCTU headquarters—the first raid on the KCTU in its 18 years of existence. The strike ended on December 30 after 22 days via a union member referendum. The establishment of SR went ahead.

Yet the strike left something important behind. The police raid on the KCTU ignited public anger—a 100,000-person rally. A 2014 analysis by the Bolshevik Group captures both the possibility of that moment and the passivity of the KCTU leadership: "Despite the struggle demands of the majority of the masses, the KCTU did not carry the so-called 'general strike' into the following week. They are letting the lid cool on a seething political cauldron."

What the railway strike revealed was that the bureaucratization of the KCTU leadership had already reached a critical point. At a moment when the struggle could have been escalated to change the playing field, the leadership chose to withdraw the struggle back into the institutional framework.

Park Geun-hye’s "Labor Reform" Offensive: The September 15 Agreement and Its Inside Story

On September 15, 2015, the Tripartite Commission (Labor-Management-Government Committee) signed the "Labor-Management-Government Agreement for the Improvement of the Labor Market Structure" (the so-called September 15 Agreement). The KCTU did not participate. Only the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) signed.

The core of the agreement was a "package of five":

Guidelines for dismissing low performers — a design that bypasses the Labor Standards Act through administrative guidelines to facilitate dismissals.
Relaxation of unfavorable changes to rules of employment — making it easier for management to push through the deterioration of working conditions.
Expansion of the dispatched worker system — expanding the scope of work where dispatch is permitted.
Extension of the fixed-term contract period — from two years to four.
Expansion of the wage peak system — cutting wages of middle-aged and older workers under the pretext of youth employment.

The Korea Labor Institute classifies the social dialogue of this period as the "formation-mobilization type"—a method in which the government pre-designs the negotiation framework to achieve its desired outcome. Despite the KCTU’s absence, the September 15 Agreement was subsequently used as the legal and institutional justification for the labor policies of the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations.

The Korean Metal Workers' Union (KMWU) and the Federation of Korean Metalworkers' Unions (FKMWU) criticized this plan, saying it would "make layoffs easier and produce more irregular workers," and launched joint resistance—paradoxically, an unusual scene in which organizations affiliated with the two rival confederations formed a united front.

Anatomy of Bureaucratization: Why Does the KCTU Apply the Brakes?

The core question that runs through this period is this: Why does the KCTU repeatedly hit the brakes at moments of rising struggle?

The answer to this question cannot be sufficiently explained by a simple "betrayal thesis." It must be analyzed structurally.

First, the formation of a full-time official stratum. Full-time union officials at large enterprises are professional activists whose livelihoods depend on union budgets. Their interests lie in stably maintaining the wages and welfare of their enterprise’s members, not in escalating the class struggle of the entire working class, including irregular workers. The more intense the struggle, the harsher the repression, and repression directly threatens their ability to run the union.

Second, entanglement with electoral politics. Through the 2000s, a segment of the KCTU leadership strengthened its tendency to lean on the Democratic Party–affiliated political camp. When the Democratic Party had a chance of coming to power, the leadership prioritized maintaining a relationship as a "friendly force" over escalating struggle. This manifested in even more extreme form under the Moon Jae-in government (the subject of Part 4).

Third, the vicious cycle of failure to organize irregular workers. The less irregular workers are organized, the more the bargaining power of regular-worker unions is weakened by the supply of irregular labor. But regular-worker unions have no incentive to invest resources in organizing irregular workers—organizing them would create conflicts of interest, while not organizing them perpetuates external competitive pressure. A double trap.

The Sewol Ferry and the Labor Movement: A Turning Point in 2014

The Sewol Ferry disaster of April 2014 was not simply a disaster. It was the most dramatic revelation of how deregulation, subcontracting, and the obsession with cost-cutting take the lives of workers and citizens. The structure of subcontracting ship management, the casualization of safety personnel, and the logic of privatizing the Coast Guard—these were the product of neoliberal restructuring since the 1990s.

Yet the labor movement was not leading in translating the Sewol disaster into the language of class politics. The Sewol disaster was processed as a civil society agenda centered on demands for a "safe society." It was much later that the labor movement put forward "break the subcontracting structure, abolish irregular work" at the forefront.

The Paradox of Institutionalization: The More Legalized, the More Impotent

The path the KCTU walked through the eight years of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye demonstrates the paradox of institutionalization. Whether to participate in the Tripartite Commission became a persistent agenda of conflict. Conditions for legal strikes were tightened, and the KCTU leadership increasingly tended to choose to remain within the legal framework. The result:

While struggles followed legal procedures, the state neutralized the effectiveness of strikes through administrative guidelines and injunctions.
In the process of pursuing "legal strikes," member mobilization became subordinated to bureaucratic procedures.
Courts continuously pressured unions even after strikes ended through charges of obstruction of business and damage claims—the amount claimed in damages surged to tens of billions of won in the 2010s.

In 2014, the total amount of damages and provisional attachment claims the government filed against the KCTU exceeded the KCTU’s annual budget. This functioned as a preemptive deterrent to suppress struggle.

The Exit of 2016: The People’s General Uprising and the Eve of the Candlelight Rally

In the waning years of the Park Geun-hye administration, 2015–2016, the KCTU led the "People’s General Uprising" (Minjung Chonggeolgi). At the People’s General Uprising rally on November 14, 2015, farmer Baek Nam-gi was felled by a police water cannon—he died in September 2016. This death once again visualized the violence of the Park Geun-hye regime.

In October 2016, the Choi Soon-sil influence-peddling scandal broke. The Candlelight Revolution began. The KCTU joined the candlelight rallies on a massive scale.

A 2020 analysis by the Bolshevik Group looks back on this moment: "During the drive to oust Park Geun-hye, serious distrust prevailed toward the capitalist establishment parties including the Democratic Party. The demonstrators had already experienced the administrations of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, and the Democratic Party had shown no appreciable difference under Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye. The demonstrators, whose consciousness was rising through struggle, instinctively kept the Democratic Party at arm’s length."

Yet even this moment was absorbed back into the institutional arena by the KCTU leadership’s choice—convergence toward impeachment politics. Where the energy of the candlelight flowed is the subject of Part 4.

The Balance Sheet of 2008–2016

This period left three structural legacies.

First, the duality of the KCTU became entrenched. The gap between its outward appearance as a fighting organization and its actual mode of operation as a bureaucratic apparatus became an open secret to its members and the public. While the unionization rate rose slowly, fighting capacity stagnated.

Second, the violence of damages and provisional attachment was institutionalized. A legal mechanism that directly attacks the financial resources of the labor movement was completed during this period. This is the prehistory of the damages claim issue emerging as a major labor movement agenda in the 2020s.

Third, the irregular worker problem remained an unresolved task. The Fixed-Term Worker Protection Act, the Dispatched Worker Act, the time-off system—all institutional restructuring did not alleviate but hardened the dual structure between regular and irregular workers. The organized labor movement failed to become the subject that would break this dual structure.

Carrying these three legacies, the labor movement greeted the 2016 candlelight rallies and the Moon Jae-in administration in 2017. What happened afterward is the story of Part 4.

References

Bolshevik Group, "The KCTU’s Struggle and Bureaucratization," 2012, 2014 (KG documents)
Bolshevik Group, "Putting a Leash on the Slave: How the Democratic Party Became the 'Candlelight Government,'" 2020 (KG document)
Korea Labor and Society Institute, "Case Presentation on the Park Geun-hye Government’s Raid on the KCTU," klsi.org (2013.12)
Korea Labor Institute, "Multiple Unions at the Enterprise Level and Collective Bargaining," 2018 (repository.kli.re.kr)
Park Tae-joo, "The Railway Workers’ Union’s Struggle to Block Privatization from the Perspective of Public Service Unionism," Industrial Labor Research, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2016
Korean Labor System Research Group, "Diagnosis and Tasks of the Korean Labor System," ltoss.co.kr (2017)
Korean Railway Workers’ Union Archive, 2013 Chronicle (archive.krwu.or.kr)
Wikipedia, "2013 Korea Railroad Corporation Union Strike"