Previous chapters empirically established the fact that Korea’s development state had been notoriously hostile to labour unions while disciplining chaebols, by suppressing labour movements forcibly and punishing chaebol families who failed to comply to the state’s preferences. This chapter revisits that important topic in more depth, by focusing on the violent suppression of the labour movement from the 1970s to 2018. Some of the years covered in the chapter overlap with the initial phase of democratization and the legal recognition of labour unions. The chapter explains why such state violence was needed for economic growth, while we also analyze why it is related to economic inequality and wage structures in Korea in the 2000s. Furthermore, as we will explain, during both the democratization and post-democratization periods, state-sourced violence and repression of the labour movement and other niche markets shifted towards privately supplied violence specialists, which acted, and continue to act, implicitly, and at times explicitly as proxies for state power.

THE LABOUR FORCE IN THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE

The issue of labour has long attracted the attention of social scientists from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines and approaches. The case of labour issues in Korea is no exception and especially so regarding scholarship focused on explaining Korea’s rapid economic miracle. When Park Chung Hee assumed power following the 1961 coup d’état, as already explained throughout the preceding chapters, he did so under the pledge to instil economic growth and order. Moving away from the import-substitution approach that had been adopted, much to the detriment of the economy by the Rhee Syngman regime, Park first focused on the development and promotion of labour-intensive EOI, mostly from 1961–72 (Haggard & Moon 1993: 54). This move towards EOI was rewarded with remarkable growth until the end of the decade when the GDP began to decline, coupled with rising inflation and wages among other worrisome economic conditions. In conjunction with an economy in decline, and thus with Park’s reduced legitimacy, politically the regime was increasingly being challenged by opposition seeking to capitalize on the weak economic performance.