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In order to contextualize Korean employment and industrial relations (EIR) in the field of EIR thought, a field largely dominated by Western ideas and experience, this chapter breaks down Korean EIR into its component parts using two particular frameworks: a union/labor management model and an employment relationship model. This structured approach brings to the fore often overlooked facts regarding Korean institutions, collective actors, socio-economic and political forces that have shaped its employment relations and industrial environment – namely, the preponderance of small to medium-sized enterprises, the highly politicized evolution of unions and employer associations and their connection to the besieged and suffering ‘haan’ mentality, the movement away from Confucian-system paternal relations and the preference for strong, centralized leadership. The chapter highlights key events that have driven a narrow labor/management bias in Korean EIR, especially the Great Labor Offensive, and examines the whole through Kaufman’s employment relations model.

This first chapter, as an introduction to the whole book, summarises how growing inequality in Europe may have emerged from mechanisms in the world of work, with a particular focus on the possible role of social dialogue and the social partners – and more generally industrial relations – in reducing inequalities. The chapter first presents some major lessons from the national chapters and summarises their contributions to the existing research: How did national industrial relations systems address inequalities over time, and what have been their effects on various sources of inequality? This introduction also reviews some concrete outcomes of collective bargaining at national, sectoral and firm level that may have helped to reduce inequalities. It extends for this purpose the number of countries (beyond those covered by national chapters) in order to provide the most extensive overview of such outcomes. Third, this introduction complements the national stories with a comparative statistical analysis from the European Structure of Earnings Survey (SES, Eurostat) to more accurately identify specific effects of collective pay agreements on pay inequality, working time distribution and work contracts. Finally, this leads us to a number of policy considerations, which are presented briefly in the closing section and further developed in the national chapters.