Abstract:
This study adopted different methodology from other studies on Hyundai Heavy Industries focused on existing labour management and labor movement. This study reconstructed concrete actual circumstances of labour world that workers of Hyundai Heavy Industries had experienced before the 1987 ‘Grand Labour Struggle'.
Since workers before the grand labor struggle performed difficult labours under dangers in existence, they considered their workplace as “jojina factory” and their life as ‘mining life ranking next to a coal mine'. Relatively high wages which was expected to offset danger in the workplace and high-intensity labour could be obtained through long work and it was a discriminative wage based on service rating score, a device to increase efficiency. Because of worldwide depression of shipbuilding in the middle of the 1980s, wages were frozen, which caused workers to increasingly have complaints. In addition, official control and military control which hurt workers' self-respect were recognized as inhuman and discriminative treatment.
The labour world workers experienced was a world ‘where normal living was lost in as dangerous a workplace as life was threatened and workers were sweated under inferior labour conditions' as they said. Under the company's suppressive and authoritative control to improve labor productivity, however, workers resisted the company in ways of ‘getting out of the company with the company's goods’, ‘venting their anger’, ‘increasing working time’ and ‘being absent or changing their occupation'.
