Shadow Labor in Care Services: Why Do South Korean Women Care Workers Work Such Long Hours and Get Paid So Little?
Korea is a country with extremely long working hours and severe gender inequality in the labor market. Based on twenty-nine in-depth interviews with Korean women care workers, this study investigates key mechanisms that reproduce unpaid and unrecognized shadow labor in paid care services. Accordingly, it argues that the presumption that it is mostly Korean men who suffer from working long hours is incorrect. Women workers work long hours, and they often do so without compensation for overtime. They also engage in labor that is not included in their original job description. The Korean labor market supplies an unlimited number of women for cheap labor in the care service sector, meaning the government can depend heavily on private organizations and businesses to meet increasing care needs among the population. Because women care workers could not specify an employer who is responsible for their wages and working conditions, they could not see themselves as employees with basic labor rights. Instead, they take the familiar roles of dutiful daughters and caring mothers, consenting to the very situation that makes them susceptible to severe wage penalties and unrecognized and unappreciated long working hours.
shadow labor, care work, working hours, South Korea, gender inequality
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The “East Asian miracle” was a fully gendered process in South Korea (hereafter Korea).1 Young unmarried women who provided cheap labor played a critical role in the development of labor-intensive export industries during the initial stage of industrialization. However, the “miracle” lost its vigor and dynamism due to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and a strong male breadwinner ideology survived intact despite the illusion of formal equality and fair market competition. As a result, the neoliberal labor market reforms that followed the financial crisis were not gender-neutral. Women workers were more frequently laid off than men, and many became “discouraged workers” who gave up seeking employment despite wanting to be working. Women’s labor market participation rate reached 49.8 percent in 1997, but it was measured at 47.1 percent in 1998. For men, the change was rather small, from 76.1 percent to 75.1 percent.2 Since then, heavily gendered conditions of Korean labor markets have become more pronounced, with severe occupational sex segregation and skewed representation of women workers in nonstandard employment arrangements. Occupational segregation by sex refers to the tendency of men and women to be employed in different lines of work.3 In Korea, sex-based hiring restrictions and other cultural barriers prevented women from working in male-dominated jobs.4 Moreover, gendered government policies have exacerbated the situation. Due to the troubled combination of neoliberal neglect and paternalistic special treatment, women workers were segregated into extremely flexible forms of work, such as temporary work and part-time jobs, while assuming the majority of care responsibilities in both the market and the household.
As an essential ingredient of the employment relationship, working time reflects and determines pay and other pecuniary and nonpecuniary rewards. Some 32 percent of Koreans worked more than forty-nine hours per week in 2015, compared with 16.4 percent for the United States and 9.3 percent for Germany, making it one of the most overworked countries.5 Usually, working long hours is considered a “man’s thing” in most countries, and Korea is not an exception. Too many hours worked by some likely results in too few hours for others, which is why more part-time women workers are found where the strong male breadwinner model predominates. Where women appear as second-class citizens in the labor market, they are often perceived to choose easier jobs with relatively shorter working hours to balance work and family life. This results in the erroneous conclusion that while women are employed in lower paying jobs, their work is fewer hours and less demanding in nature compared with that of men.
This paper argues against the presumption that it is mostly Korean men who suffer from working long hours. It is certainly true that, on average, Korean men work longer hours than Korean women. In 2017, men worked 45.2 hours per week, whereas women worked 39.6 hours.6 However, men are more likely to be compensated for their overtime work. It is not just aspiring career women with a strong desire to break the glass ceiling who work long hours in Korea. The growth of female-dominated care service sectors has produced many precarious jobs in which women workers work long hours without proper payment. [End Page 254] Prevalent practices of working long hours in almost all sectors of the economy oblige women care workers to work excessive hours, to care for children, the elderly, and the sick family members of those workers who cannot balance work and life. In addition, women care workers are typically employed by small businesses where employers’ violations of labor standards are pervasive. In Korea, one has to be employed by a business with more than five workers to be fully protected by the Labor Standards Law. Therefore, official statistics regarding annual hours actually worked per worker may not reveal the true state of unpaid and unrecognized labor in the workplace. This study defines such uncompensated and irrelevant work in the workplace as shadow labor.
The problem of shadow labor is particularly problematic among care workers, because work schedules may be subject to frequent changes and workers sometimes have to endure extremely long hours without overtime allowances. The overwhelming majority of care workers in Korea are women (a pattern repeated in many other countries).7 While working long hours can be considered a privilege in Korea because it is related to regular status, higher wages, and more protection in the context of an underdeveloped welfare state, some women care workers who work longer hours than the average male workers are denied such privileges. What is much worse than working long hours is working long hours without being recognized as working long hours. Shadow labor of women care workers has contributed to a large gender pay gap and durable gender inequality in Korea.8
What are the key mechanisms that reproduce unpaid labor in the paid care service sector? Why do women care workers consent to shadow labor in the workplace? And how do gender dimensions of shadow labor translate into and reinforce gender inequality at the societal level? The purpose of this study is to produce greater in-depth knowledge of women’s paid care work by bringing their shadow labor to light. In the globalized world, women care workers have become the most marginalized underclass among labor markets.9 However, because their work is rendered insignificant and trivial, long, unpaid working hours have received little attention. Korea, a country of extremely long working hours with severe gender inequality in the labor markets, provides a fertile context to investigate the causes and consequences of shadow labor in care services. This study begins by reviewing previous literature on care work and shadow labor, followed by a presentation of data. After demonstrating major findings, it concludes with research and policy implications.
BACKGROUND
Care Work in the Gendered Labor Market
Caregiving as a form of paid labor has distinctive characteristics that differentiate it from other service work. For example, Paula England, Michelle Budig, and [End Page 255] Nancy Folbre define care work as “occupations in which workers are supposed to provide a face-to-face service that develops the human capabilities of the recipients.”10 For Nancy Folbre, it is “work in which concern for the well-being of the care recipient is likely to affect the quality of the services provided.”11 In general, care work is characterized by a unique relational labor process where most caregiving activities are inevitably directed toward a dependent population.12 These “relational” and “motivational” aspects of care work devalue caregiving activities. While many service workers simply execute emotional labor, care workers go further and develop genuine emotional attachments. The emotional aspects of care work create strong attachments with the recipients of care and even employers, making it difficult to enforce labor contracts.13 As care workers become more caring, it becomes harder to negotiate higher wages and better working conditions, which might have a negative effect on their clients.14
As a result, caring occupations are underpaid compared with other forms of work, even after controlling for many socio-demographic and organizational factors,15 due to “socially imposed altruism.”16 In a world of forced altruism, it is better that wages of care workers remain low. Thus, the profession can attract the most altruistic people who are better suited to the task. This leads to a perverse claim that “a badly paid nurse is a good nurse.”17 This apparent confounding of “love” and “money” in many jobs in paid care18 leads to ambiguous tasks, multitasking, and self-sacrificing devotion.19 According to the study by England, Budig, and Folbre, both female and male workers in the care service sector experienced a significant net wage penalty of between 5 percent and 6 percent.20 This penalty increased if care work was more similar to the work of mothering. This is because skills associated with mothering are considered natural, and thus these care workers are pressured to provide care despite accepting a wage penalty. For example, wages of childcare women workers were 41 percent lower than the wages of comparable women workers with similar skill levels in occupations that do not involve care.
However, the wage penalty of care work may not be uniform across countries, because macro-level factors may either lessen or augment them. Based on a comparative study of twelve countries representing a variety of policy designs for care work in a range of economic contexts, Michelle Budig and Joya Misra demonstrated that income inequality; labor market institutions, especially trade union strength; and size of the public sector influenced cross-national variation in the effect of care work on wage penalties.21 Where income was more unequally distributed, penalties for care work were higher. Centralized collective bargaining institutions produced smaller penalties for care work. Women in countries with higher union density even received wage bonuses for doing care work. Finally, state provision of care measured by the percentage of care employment in the public sector tended to increase both male and female workers’ wages in the care services sector. In Sweden, where these three factors were strongly present, care occupations, despite being exclusively held by women workers, did not have lower [End Page 256] prestige or wages.22 The fact that Sweden comes closest to the citizen-carerworker model, in which women and men equally share domestic labor and childrearing activities, is related to these findings.
Korea and Sweden are opposite in terms of these macro-level institutional factors. The Korean state has always prioritized economic growth over welfare. Although Korea has drastically expanded social service programs since the early 2000s,23 public social spending accounted for only 12 percent of GDP in 2019, while other OECD countries spent over 20 percent on average.24 Meanwhile, two decades of constant labor market flexibility promotion has produced a large number of nonstandard workers who amount to approximately one-third of all wage earners. For women, the situation has been worse. More than 40 percent of women workers have been employed in nonstandard employment arrangements over the last two decades,25 because nonstandard jobs have increased faster in service jobs dominated by women than in manufacturing jobs.26 While barely 10 percent of workers were organized over the last twenty years in Korea, women’s union membership was much lower, being static at around 5 percent.27 Moreover, an extremely decentralized collective bargaining structure aggravated the widening wage gap between the organized and unorganized, the regular and nonstandard, and the male and female workers.
It is therefore unsurprising that a study conducted in 2016 found an astonishing wage penalty of 30 percent among care service sector workers.28 Using an 2016 official data set by the Ministry of Employment and Labor, the Survey on Labor Conditions by Employment Type, Ham Sŏnyu and Kwŏn Hyŏnji29 demonstrated that the wage penalty deepened when care workers are employed in establishments with a higher percentage of women workers and also in smaller establishments where the Labor Standards Law was frequently violated. Korea’s gender pay gap was the largest among OECD countries, reaching 34.1 percent in 2018.30 Furthermore, with unusually long working hours totaling nearly two thousand hours per year for 2018,31 male workers seldom contributed to domestic labor, while women workers were burdened with a disproportionately high amount of care work in both the labor market and the family.32
Shadow Labor and “Manufacturing Consent”
When Ivan Illich coined the term shadow work,33 it was intended to refer to all unpaid labor completed by people to supplement paid labor in the industrial economy, such as housework or commuting (the unpaid activity in addition to and supportive of earning one’s wages). The concept of shadow work was revisited by Craig Lambert, who explored unpaid tasks that had been turned over to people on behalf of businesses and organizations, such as pumping one’s own gas and bagging one’s own groceries.34 Even if shadow work involves small or ordinary tasks that require insignificant amounts of labor, it may not be so inconsequential [End Page 257] when applied regularly in the workplace. Inspired by their work, this study focuses on shadow labor in paid care service work in Korea. To do so, this study defines shadow labor as: (1) extra hours of work that are not compensated in the workplace; and (2) all other tasks that have little to no relevance to the original job description of the worker. Unpaid care work has been strongly related to an unequal responsibility of women done free at home,35 and this tendency is more prominent in Korea, where “wise mother and good wife” is still the dominant gender ideology.36 Such a biased set of expectations for women had adverse impact on women care workers as well, forcing them to work more than what they are paid for. Therefore, in addition to unpaid care work done by female family members, paid care work has the potential to become a cradle of shadow labor. The current study is first to highlight such “unpaid” hours and components of paid care service work in Korea.
When home care workers, mostly women, take over the activities of women relatives in caring for children or the elderly, their work is considered an extension of ordinary domestic labor that requires minimal preparation, thereby devaluing caring labor.37 These jobs with a clear connection to the domestic sphere frequently require emotional labor.38 According to Arlie Russell Hochschild, emotional labor refers to the work of managing one’s own emotions as the essential requirements of certain occupations.39 Arlene Kaplan Daniels argues that women’s emotional work is considered invisible because “such activity is not seen as learned, skilled, required, but only the expression of the character of style of women in general.”40 The invisible and unrecognized characteristics of caring work subtly and secretly infiltrate the labor process as a whole, which results in many uncompensated working hours and blurring of paid and unpaid tasks. One study reveals that these workers have conflicting identities as formal service workers and informal caregivers, frequently working beyond their official working hours.41
The selling of labor in care services becomes even more complicated when the state neglects its responsibility for the direct provision of care. Care work is a public good that creates meaningful collective benefits; however, increases in productivity using technological innovations are fairly restricted unlike in manufacturing sectors. Due to the relational aspects of care work, increasing just the number of clients tends to sacrifice quality of care services. Thus, without public support, wages and working conditions are bound to deteriorate.42 The Korean welfare state not only spends less on care services compared to other developed countries, but it is also heavily dependent on private sector businesses and organizations to meet the growing care needs of the population.43 While childcare facilities increased rapidly over the last couple of decades, 86 percent of childcare services were provided by private sector facilities (in 2015).44 Eldercare services were also universally available after the introduction of the Long Term Care Insurance Scheme in 2008. The government is dependent on private nursing homes for elder care, which represented 78 percent of all eldercare facilities in 2015.45 Thus, Korean care workers have to face three latent employers simultaneously: the client who [End Page 258] needs their care work, the center-employer who manages them, and the government that regulates their actual wage rates. However, none takes the role of a direct employer. In addition, Korea is an unusual country where women’s labor market participation is represented by an M-curve. Due to career breaks, middle-aged or older women are concentrated in precarious jobs with very limited options. The influx of migrant women workers in the care service sector has exacerbated this situation. Significant oversupply of labor reinforced cutthroat competition among private sector care providers, which has inevitably brought about unstable jobs and low wages for care workers.
According to Michael Burawoy, an important component of the capitalist labor process is obscuring of surplus value, which is critical to secure surplus value without provoking the resistance of workers.46 To do so, consent must predominate over coercion; or at least, different combinations of force or consent are needed. Similarly, for shadow labor in care services to be sustainable, it requires consent at the point of production. The multilateral nature of employment relationships in the Korean care service sector facilitates the easy concealment of power and hierarchy in the labor process. Despite low wages and unbearable working conditions, a lack of alternative decent jobs and almost nonexistent bargaining power diminishes the possibilities of care workers’ resistance. Against this backdrop, strong “familism” in Korea has filled the void left by an obscured and coercive employment relationship. Unlike Japanese Confucian familism, in Korea it is deliberatively cultivated by the state to reduce labor management conflicts.47 Familism is a key characteristic of the Korean care regime.48 The state assumes that major care responsibilities reside with families, and it depends on both the market and families for care services. Care workers are thus expected to behave like members of the family while selling their labor in the labor market.49
The role of familism in generating consent may differ according to the socioeconomic background of care workers. A younger, university-educated worker in a daycare center is more likely to play the role of a dutiful daughter in a patriarchal family. For the sake of her coworkers in this fabricated extended family, she sacrifices her labor rights and participates in the labor process far beyond what is required. An older and less educated home care worker does not have coworkers. In this case, familism becomes more prominent in her direct relations with clients, making her feel like “they are like a family.” In a study comparing native Korean care workers with Korean Chinese care workers, Yang-Sook Kim effectively revealed a “fictive-kin” strategy of immigrant workers compared with the professionalism of native workers. In constant competition with immigrant workers, some native Korean workers—especially those older workers with no credentials—may have to emulate immigrant workers’ “emotionally attentive care” or risk losing their jobs.50 As a result, care workers themselves inadvertently mystify their labor relations while attempting to acquire emotional satisfaction to compensate for the lack of recognition and low wages. The process of consent formation culminates [End Page 259] with this “adaptation,” what Charles Tilly formulates as one of the four key mechanisms of durable inequality.51
In sum, the literature reviewed in this section suggests that care work in the gendered labor market is not only underpaid but also unpaid under certain circumstances. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that long working hours of Korean women care workers have been unrecognized. In the following sections, this study illuminates this long-neglected fact by investigating the key mechanisms that make these women care workers consent to work such long hours and get paid so little. Findings of this study would extend our understanding of how shadow labor in care services can reinforce and reproduce gender discrimination at the societal level in Korea.
DATA
Data for this paper were collected as part of a larger research project that investigated work experiences of service sector workers.52 My analysis in this study was based on twenty-nine in-depth interviews with women care workers. The interviews were conducted in August and September of 2015 with an interview guide consisting of open-ended questions.53 Interviewees were recruited from Seoul and the metropolitan area. Sample selection was aided by a professional research institute to reflect the age, occupation, and employment status of the population in the care service sector. The interviews lasted from one and a half to two hours per interviewee. The data included information about job characteristics, labor processes, actual work hours, daily schedules, wages, and attitudes toward basic labor rights. Respondents were asked to express their opinions and thoughts freely, especially regarding their views on working conditions and environment. All of the interviews were voice-recorded, transcribed, and coded for basic statistical analyses. Table 1 lists the respondents and their socioeconomic characteristics, occupations, and detailed employment statuses.
In this study, care work is broadly defined as services done to develop people’s capabilities or to help them to maintain lives as they wish. The respondents were all paid care workers. They54 included ten childcare teachers at daycare centers,55 six childcare workers who carried out their caring activities in clients’ home, five hospital-based care workers who helped hospitalized patients,56 two certified eldercare workers who cared for the elderly either in their home or in institutions,57 three care workers for the disabled who assisted their daily activities, one teacher for disabled children, and two housekeepers. Nineteen workers were employed fulltime, while ten worked part-time.58 The average age of interviewees was fifty-oneand-a-half years old. Except for childcare teachers at daycare centers (who were aged from their late twenties to midforties), most other care workers were in their sixties. While a majority of younger childcare teachers had at least two years of college education, a majority of older care workers had less than a high school education. [End Page 260]
Descriptions of Interviewees
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FINDINGS
After analyzing the data, I find three themes. The first theme focuses on how long Korean women care workers work and how working overtime is not compensated properly. The second theme presents specific situations under which boundaries of paid and unpaid care work become indistinguishable, which forces care workers to work on tasks that are unrelated to the original job description. The third theme deals with crucial mechanisms that make these workers concede to severe wage penalties and extremely long working hours. The reproduction of shadow labor in care services is sustained by both consent and coercion.
“Wrong” Working Hours
The criteria for determining “long” working hours is a difficult issue to determine in Korea, a country where workers are particularly overworked. However, long working hours should not only be measured by the length of working time. Article 54 of the Labor Standards Act (LSA) in Korea makes clear that an employer should allow a recess period of more than thirty minutes for every four working hours and more than one hour for every eight hours during the working period. Korean employers typically provide a one-hour meal break for those who work eight hours per day. Whether a reasonable rest period is provided is therefore also an important criterion for investigating the effects of long working hours on workers. In addition, overtime should be properly compensated. Article 56 of the LSA requires that workers receive 50 percent or more of their ordinary wage for extended work, night work, or holiday work.
Almost all full-time care workers who participated in this study were coping with excessive working hours. Some part-time workers chose to work part-time after experiencing burnout syndrome while working full-time. Among them, childcare teachers working at daycare centers appeared to have the most reasonable working hours. Daycare teachers were supposed to work nine hours per day, forty-five hours per week, with a one-hour recess. During these nine hours, however, they did not seem to have enough rest. A survey of daycare teachers and facilities support this result.59 In 2015, when interviews were conducted, the average working hours per day of a typical midcareer daycare teacher were nine hours and thirtyseven minutes. This was reduced to nine hours and seven minutes in 2018, but their average lunch break was still just seven minutes:60
We do have a one-hour meal break, but we have to take care of children during the lunch break.
(Cho Kyŏnghŭi)
I can’t go to the restroom sometimes. I have to hold my pee and go to the restroom just one during the afternoon. I have to find someone else just to go to the restroom.
(Yun Sojŏng)
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Some of them were not able to request annual leave or sick leave. According to Cho Kyŏnghŭi, a thirty-eight-year-old daycare teacher, it is required that they ask for a substitute teacher at least one month in advance to use annual leave, which is almost impossible. Hong Myŏnghŭi, a forty-seven-year-old daycare teacher, described their situation: “We can’t afford a concept like sick leave.” Many respondents expressed similar opinions:
We can’t get sick here. Kids who are preschool age frequently get colds, and teachers eventually get them, too. But sick leave is unthinkable. Because there is nobody who can do the work that I do here.
(Cho Soyŏng)
I asked for a day off per month, but the director of the center complained so much when I used it. So I stop asking for a leave of absence.
(Mun Suyŏn)
They had to work overtime frequently, sometimes even during weekends, without overtime allowances:
The center has so many events and ceremonies. To prepare for them, I have to work until eight or nine o’clock for over a week. The center doesn’t pay for the overtime. I get some snacks for working more than twelve hours straight. I just don’t understand why this job is so underpaid, and undervalued.
(Pae Sinju)
Unfair treatment in my workplace? Being not paid for all the work I do here. After working for five more hours after the day was over, I asked the head of the center to pay me at least one hour of overtime allowance. She said that “well, don’t you know that we are in the same boat?” It is really difficult to work like this, laboring so hard yet not being paid properly.
(Ch’oe Kyŏngmin)
Older full-time home care workers for children worked much longer than centerbased daycare teachers. They spent approximately ten to twelve hours per day (fifty to sixty hours per week) on childcare activities, and their working hours were quite erratic. Because they could not leave the home until the parents came, they often worked overtime. A common practice of working long hours in Korean businesses and organizations has kept working mothers and fathers from coming home on time, forcing these care workers to work longer hours:
I work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. But the mother of the baby works really late and can’t come home by 7 p.m. I value good relationship with my clients (mostly mothers), so I put up with these extra hours of work. However, I don’t have a labor contract. So I don’t get paid for these overtimes. It makes me really mad.
(Yi Yŏngsin)
In addition, home care workers were exposed to unpredictable work schedules. Last-minute cancellations are not uncommon in this job. Uncertain work schedules veil the fact that care workers work extremely long hours when they have a chance [End Page 263] to work. At the same time, as an important dimension of precarious employment, this can exacerbate work-life conflicts for women workers:61
She (the mother of the baby) suddenly canceled my childcare service on the first day of the second month. She told me that I didn’t seem to get along with the baby. But I’ve already been working there for a month. She should have known this before asking me to do it for another month. So I couldn’t work for the whole month.
(Pak Malsŏn)
Hospital-based care workers endured the longest working hours among participants in this study. Unlike certified eldercare workers who worked specified hours, most hospital-based care workers worked twenty-four hours per day, sleeping in the hospital alongside patients. There was no limit how long they could work. A reasonable schedule would be working three or four days per week, with a partner care worker who also works the same amount. In this way, they can take care of one patient together, working a total of eighty-four hours per week. However, most hospital-based care workers worked six days per week (144 hours per week), taking just one day off, to catch up on their own housework. Some even worked two consecutive weeks without a break. Due to such long working hours, Pak Yusim, a sixty-nine-year-old hospital-based care worker, believed that women in their thirties and forties could not do this kind of work. It is because their husbands and young children cannot live without her for so long. For Yusim, “it is not a job, but a harsh punishment . . . sitting in one place for sixteen hours straight.”
Gosh, we aren’t receiving the minimum wage. Hospital-based care workers are working under terrible situation. I can’t get enough sleep during the night. The patient woke me up several times. I took time off for just once for the last ten years, when I hurt my back. I got hurt working for the patient, but I couldn’t receive any compensation for it. You know, care workers at my age are also very sick. They took a lot of pills. It’s like patients taking care of patients. I have back pain, but I have to do this job. It’s something you really don’t want to do.
(Pak Yusim)
Because hospitals did not hire care workers directly, it is not possible for them to ask for a staff lounge or a place to rest. To make things worse, after enduring such a long work week, they have to face a heavy second shift at home:
I don’t have any vacation at all. I do wish I could have one, though. Taking care of the sick elderly is very hard. I can’t get any rest during the day. I hope I can have some place to have a break, for just thirty minutes. It’s really hard, but when I go back to home, I get even busier and am overwhelmed by endless list of chores that need to be done around the house.
(Pak Kŭmja)
Older and less educated women workers among the study participants had to engage in longer and harder kinds of care work, reflecting their extremely weak bargaining power in the labor market. Their work experiences indicate that Korean [End Page 264] women care workers work longer than official statistics tell us. No compensation for overtime and lack of break time compound the issue. Their working hours were not only long but also “wrong.”
Shadowy Boundaries of Paid and Unpaid Care Work
One of the reasons that women care workers work such long hours was because they engage in labor that is not part of their job descriptions. For example, daycare teachers were only paid for jobs that directly involve the care of children. No working time was allocated to paperwork. Therefore, along with countless meetings, communications with parents, regular and unexpected events during both weekdays and weekends, and invisible emotional labor, daycare teachers had to find extra time to finish paperwork. As a result, daycare teachers in this study frequently brought their own laptops to do paperwork during lunch breaks, which they then continued to do at home after the day’s work was over if tasks could not be completed in the workplace:
We have to do a lot of paperwork in addition to regular childcare work. So I usually bring papers and documents to my home. After two hours of extra work, I just collapse from exhaustion, and go to sleep.
(Mun Suyŏn)
In one sense, this shadow labor is not literally “shadow.” These jobs should be included in their job description and properly remunerated. In fact, a significant part of their labor was not regarded a “real” job. Home care workers had to face more severe forms of shadow labor because their workplaces were located in the private domain. This creates a problem in that their “whole” job did not look like a “real” job. Thus, their wages did not increase as they accumulated work experience. Hong Pobae, a fifty-one-year-old family childcare worker, explained the situation as follows:
I am very frustrated that they consider this job as being so easy. “Pushing a baby carriage, it’s not a real job. They earn so much for just doing that . . . ” I’m working more than ten years now, but there is no wage difference between me and the sitter who just started a job.
(Hong Pobae)
In addition, without proper labor contracts that specify job description, home care workers were asked to do the housework while caring for babies. Sometimes, parents did not even need to make such requests. It is necessary to have clean clothes and well-prepared meals to take care of children. Childcare workers themselves had to take on heavy housekeeping duties, and many family childcare workers performed child caregiving and housekeeping simultaneously for a variety of reasons: [End Page 265]
It’s very hard not to work for the whole family. Can you do the laundry just for the baby? Can you wash the dishes only for the baby? It’s really hard not to.
(Pak Malsŏn)
Even if the baby is sleeping, I can’t take a nap. She (the mother of the baby) is nice to me, so I wash the dishes, prepare the meal.
(Yi Yŏngsin)
I am here to look after the baby. But she (the mother of the baby) asks me to prepare a meal, do the laundry, and even ironing. For them, a home care worker is also a housekeeper.
(Hong Pobae)
Yi Ŭiyŏng, aged sixty-three, worked as a certified eldercare worker in the early afternoon and then as a home care worker for a child during the late afternoon, so she worked at two different homes in a day. Her description of how she did her work epitomizes the rampant practices of shadow labor in care services:
I have two jobs. From 11:40 a.m. to 3:40 p.m., I take care of one elderly lady at her home. Once I was making coffee for friends of the lady’s daughter. The director of the Family Support Center, who was at the time visiting the home, got really mad at this daughter, and complained that she shouldn’t let me do these things.
After 3:40 p.m., I walk to the other home to care for a baby. I work there from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. The problem is, the mother of the baby asks me to do other chores in addition to taking care of the baby. So, I really don’t have any time to rest. When the baby is asleep, I do the laundry for her.
(Yi Ŭiyŏng)
Other certified eldercare workers had similar experiences of engaging in both paid and other unpaid work. This forced, “voluntary” unpaid work was so burdensome, even the longest-working hospital-based care workers were afraid to work in this way:
Luckily, I am working at a hospital. Home care workers go through a lot because there are so many inappropriate requests to do all sorts of chores. They say that caregivers like us die earlier, maybe seven to eight years, because we don’t eat and sleep well.
(Pak Ŭnjun)
I am working at my client’s home, taking care of an old lady with Alzheimer’s disease. But I am also the one who runs this house, doing all housekeeping jobs.
(Song Chŏmsun)
Care workers for the disabled were also not free from shadow labor. Due to the extremely dependent situation of their care receivers, they were often regarded as good-hearted volunteers rather than workers. Irregular work schedules were one of the reasons why they worked “voluntarily” for extra hours. For example, Yŏ Kyŏnghŭi, a forty-four-year-old care worker for the disabled, was supposed to work for five hours per day. However, this varied as she worked for just one hour on one [End Page 266] day and more than ten hours on other days. She stated that the hardest part was that the parents or families of the disabled took her service for granted. Even when these care workers were injured by unexpected actions of the disabled children, they were not compensated by anyone, including parents and guardians:
You know, they (the parents of the disabled) just took my service for granted. Welfare means free service for them. Once the mother of the child asked me to work more for nothing. It’s really unacceptable, because sometimes I had to pay for a snack that the kid asked me to buy him. Some of my friend workers think that they are doing volunteer work.
(Yŏ Kyŏnghŭi)
This intermingling of paid work and unpaid work occurred because either women care workers did not try hard enough to avoid it, or they willingly accepted the unpaid extra work. Kim Chŏngwŏn, a fifty-two-year-old home care worker, vividly portrayed the transfer process as follows. She was working part-time to care for a seven-year-old boy in her client’s home. Although she graduated from a university, teaching him to complete many home assignments of English kindergarten was very hard and annoying for her. Either the mother or father was supposed to help him during the weekends. However, her client, the mother, shifted the responsibility back and forth a while, and suddenly it became Chŏngwŏn’s job entirely. Similarly, Chŏngwŏn was not responsible for preparing a dinner for the boy. She was working just four hours per day. However, the mother, who was supposed to come home at seven o’clock so that Chŏngwŏn could go back to her own home, came home much later. Chŏngwŏn therefore had to prepare the meal for the child, which was not in her job description in the beginning. Despite having downloaded a sample contract form from the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family portal site, her client was always reluctant to follow it, and she finally gave up trying to keep to a formal labor contract. According to Chŏngwŏn, the amount of work she had to do increased as time went by, while her wages stayed the same. She said, “After the child enters elementary school, I want to quit this job. It’s just too much.” The story of Kim Chŏngwŏn demonstrates how incrementally expanding shadow labor finally overwhelms a care worker.
The Precarious Balance between Consent and Coercion
Why did these Korean women care workers accept long working hours associated with shadow labor? First of all, the multilateral labor relations in care services prevented care workers from specifying their direct employers, which led to some judicial precedents that denied the existence of a labor relationship.62 Consequently, the identities of a majority of workers employed in care services were located in a “gray area” between employment and self-employment.63 Mun Suyŏn, a twenty-eightyear-old daycare teacher, stated, “I am neither a worker, nor a teacher, nor a public officer.” For older care workers taking care of individual clients, it was even harder [End Page 267] to conceive the idea of them being workers. Ŭn Kyŏng, a sixty-seven-year-old hospital-based care worker, believed she did not need trade union membership because she is actually not a worker:
I love my work, and I am very happy to have this opportunity. Well, we’d better not to care about labor rights or trade unions.
(Ŭn Kyŏng)
In this context, wage payment may not only be compensation for their labor. As Viviana A. Zelizer explains, “The social and symbolic significance of money” should be investigated.64 Older respondents tended to be ashamed of their low economic status. For old generations of Koreans, it is considered unfortunate if women must work to support the family. Therefore, extra-economic concerns made it difficult for them to demand a just wage. It was possible that they used their attachment to clients and care receivers to disguise their real feelings about not having any other work alternatives. Yi Yŏngsin, a sixty-four-year-old family childcare worker, was resentful of not being paid overtime allowances, but she later confessed to refusing the overtime pay offered by the client. This was because she did not want her client to think she was actually a very poor woman who needed to support her family by herself:
I work twelve hours per day, earning just 1.2 million won (about USD 1,022), which is far below the minimum wage. I have so many aching body parts, but I cannot say anything to the baby’s mom; I just got so close to her. I think I should take care of myself. The baby’s mom, I don’t know how much she earns, but I am sure that it’s hard for them to pay this amount, even if they have a dual income. Maybe because I am not confident and have low self-esteem, I refused to receive the overtime pay. I am poor, but I don’t want to be seen as poor. If I were rich, I could have received the money.
(Yi Yŏngsin)
However, even if their work involved shadow labor without proper payment, it was worth enduring. These older women workers had mixed feelings about their poorly paid jobs. It was true that they were not so proud of their work, but at the same time, it was an extraordinary experience for them to become a breadwinner. Many of them used to be completely dependent on their husbands for a living. Even Pak Yusim (who said her job was like a harsh punishment) was satisfied with the job because she was very happy to have earning power: “My husband likes it that I no longer ask for money.”
At first, I looked down on this job, family childcare worker. It’s such a low wage job. But I have nothing else to do as I get older. Now I am happy to work four hours per day.
(Yi Kyeja)
I think it’s really great that I am healthy enough to do this hard work. You see, I can work because I am a woman. Men at my age [sixty-six years old] have no chance to get any job.
(Pak Kŭmja)
[End Page 268]
While lacking the identity of “worker,” the resemblance of paid care work to domestic labor reminded care workers of family relations. A significant number of participants of this study mentioned that they and their clients were like a family. However, for childcare teachers, it was not because the children at daycare centers were like their own children. As Hong Myŏnghŭi expressed, childcare teachers of childrearing age were already too busy with their own children. According to Mun Suyŏn, the director of the center and their colleagues were like their family. Feeling “silent pressure” from them, childcare teachers did not feel they could make any complaints or requests unlike any typical workers:
I like kids very much. They are really, really cute. My kids are now grown up. But my coworkers in their thirties don’t like them very much. They are so tired taking care of their own kids in addition to children here, so they could die from exhaustion.
(Hong Myŏnghŭi)
We are all like one big family, so we can’t ask for overtime allowances. Once I got pneumonia, a child at the center gave me the disease, I have to work until eleven at night from eight in the morning. It’s a really maddening situation.
(Mun Suyŏn)
Cho Soyŏng, a twenty-eight-year-old daycare teacher, suggested that “because we are one big family, making complaints against the daycare center is equal to insulting it.” The identity of a family caregiver was in conflict with the identity of a worker, preventing care workers from demanding overtime allowances and refusing to engage in shadow labor.
Conversely, older home care workers maintained much more intimate relationships with their clients. For example, Hong Pobae, who was angry because her job was not regarded as “real” job, believed that she could not ask for overtime allowances because she was very close to the family. She prided herself on the fact that the baby she was taking care of cried a lot when she changed her clothes to go home. She said, “He’s like my own baby. This job was so rewarding and gratifying.” Some participants went as far as identifying themselves with clients, worrying about their ability to pay. As Pak Ŭnjun, a sixty-four-year-old hospital-based care worker, observed, “Well, the pay is low, sure. But those who pay for this might be hard to pay.” When combined with the intrinsic rewards of care work and genuine concern for their clients’ well-being, such interests in maintaining family-like relationships can be a powerful mechanism that generates consent at the point of care service production. Pak Kŭmja, a sixty-six-year-old hospitalbased care worker who wished for just a thirty minute break, made a vow that she would take care of her client until she dies despite low wages and bad working conditions:
We are not even receiving the minimum wage. But from the perspective of the family member of the sick, they have to pay a lot. So, I am just receiving what they give to [End Page 269] me. . . . I don’t care about my labor rights. My family have enough income, they don’t want me to do this job. And I think it’s really a bad job. But the sick lady I am taking care of, she asked me to look after her until she dies. Her words were stuck in my mind. She’s like my own mom, so pitiful. I am happy that I can help somebody who is like my mother.
(Pak Kŭmja)
However, it is also the case that even those care workers who developed strong family relations with their coworkers and clients suffered from the unfairness inherent in shadow labor. As the case of Kim Chŏngwŏn demonstrates, some respondents were ready to quit or make a complaint whenever given a chance:
Well, as we get to know each other—the client, she’s a very young mother, she calls me auntie—I just want to do anything for her. But I am also not happy doing what I am not supposed to do. So eventually I want to do the cashier work, quitting this one.
(Yi Yŏngsin)
Yi Ŭiyŏng, who took care of both an elderly lady and a baby in two part-time jobs, was quite content with her close relationship with the baby’s mother, whom she loved like her own daughter. Despite that fact, she was unhappy about having to engage in a wide variety of shadow labor. After asking her coworker why she should do shadow labor, she realized that such unfair labor practices continued because these care workers were scared of losing such “bad” jobs, forcing them to accept anything clients asked them to do. Pak Yusim confirmed this by saying “well, even if I had to care for a horrible, bad-tempered patient, I kept working because I was afraid that the agency would not assign a job for me anymore if I quit.” This clearly demonstrated that consent of care workers, if there were any, might be very fragile and surrounded by coercion:
The center forbids doing extra unpaid work, but the mother of the baby, I guess she must be quite busy. Well, she may be rich, but she’s a working mom. I do not have a daughter, but if she were my daughter, I would have done the same for her. I do not want extra pay for this. It’s just because I want to do it for her. . . However, if these things happen constantly, I mean, having to do both babysitting and housekeeping in a messy home, I would quit the job. It’s too difficult. I think they keep asking us to do so because other care workers do as they are told. I was really curious, so I asked one coworker why she did housekeeping as well as babysitting. She said, she did it because she was afraid that she would be fired. There are so many care workers with such submissive attitude.
(Yi Ŭiyŏng)
Facing a formidable labor market structure that systematically excluded them from decent jobs and being constantly asked to do unpaid shadow labor in paid care work, Korean women care workers tried to overcome cognitive dissonance by assuming close family relationships with their workplaces.65 However, the material basis for consent seemed too restricted to sustain this for a long time. The problem [End Page 270] of excessive working hours and shadow labor endangered the quality of care services and the mental and physical health of care workers. As Ch’oe Kyŏngmin mentioned, “Anyone can get crazy taking care of babies for twelve hours straight.” Increasing numbers of revelations related to child abuse in daycare centers proved this point.66 Above all, frustrated care workers could not be happy and were starting to express their disappointments. Ch’oe Kyŏngmin felt “unfairness” and thought that “something’s wrong.” Pae Sinju thought that they should get paid more and they should not be treated with such contempt. The Korean government has always prioritized the reduction of welfare costs and increased accessibility of social services over the working conditions of care workers. In this “trilemmic” relationship, it was inevitable that the quality of jobs in care services would be sacrificed.67 Participants in this study revealed that the balance between consent and coercion that bolstered the current care regime might be a lot more tenuous than the Korean government wanted it to be.
DISCUSSION
This study reveals the key mechanisms of shadow labor in Korean care services. Korean women care workers are found to work exceptionally long hours without being paid for some of their caregiving activities. In an attempt to meet the rapidly increasing care needs among its population, the Korean government depend heavily on private sector for profit organizations for the provision of care. In the meantime, the government has not spent enough to improve wages and working conditions of care workers. Such a defective care regime has been sustained by an equally flawed Korean work regime.68 A majority of the marginalized underclass in the labor market are women. The segmented and discriminatory Korean labor market supplies an unlimited number of women to work in the care service sector, meaning the government can provide care services with minimal spending. When confronted with a situation where no one assumes the role of employer, women care workers cannot see themselves as employees with basic labor rights. Instead, they take the familiar role of dutiful daughters and caring mothers, consenting to the very situation that makes them suffer severe wage penalties and unrecognized and unappreciated long working hours.
Since 2015, when the data for this study was collected, there have been some changes in labor relations in the care service sector. The Childcare Division of the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union (KPTU) was established in August 2018.69 Although it was initially composed of just sixty-nine members, now childcare teachers have an outlet to have their voices heard. The conflict between part-time after-school women care workers for elementary school students and the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE) should also be noted. When after-school care work was introduced in 2004, care workers were employed as full-time workers, working eight hours per day, forty hours per week. However, [End Page 271] since 2014, the SMOE has employed care workers on a part-time basis working only four hours per day without an exception. According to the Korean Women’s Union’s internal survey conducted in 2018, the time spent on paperwork and counseling time with parents were not included in these four hours. Therefore, a majority of part-time women care workers actually worked more than five or six hours per day. Among them, only 13.5 percent received overtime allowances.70 These women care workers began a sit-in tent protest on May 13, 2019, demanding six hours working time during semesters and eight hours during vacations. After 228 days, care workers finally came to a settlement with the SMOE on December 26, 2019. Both agreed that thirty minutes of paid recess period should be provided to care workers when they work four hours per day.71 This settlement was rather bizarre, because the labor law already required an employer to provide rest periods of more than thirty minutes for every four working hours. This incident illustrates, first, that Korean women care workers still have a long way to go to enjoy full labor rights, and second, that some women care workers have begun to be acknowledged as employees with a right to be protected by the labor law.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 rolled back this meager progress. Like in previous economic crises, the rate of loss among women’s jobs was higher than men’s. Women temporary care workers had to bear the immediate economic shocks while shouldering the burden of increased unpaid care work at home. This study concentrates on shadow labor in paid care services, but shadow labor in the wider sense also includes unpaid domestic labor. Korean women suffer from both forms of shadow labor. Therefore, the pandemic and the Korean development model had one common element that diminished women’s status in society: “care” as shadow labor. As long as care labor remains unimportant and insignificant, women cannot overcome the contradictions inherent in women’s strategies to achieve equality both in the labor market and the family. Even if she aspires to be a worker with full labor rights, a woman is not treated equally due to her unequal share of care work at home. If she chooses temporary and part-time care jobs in the workplace, keeping her main responsibility for unpaid caregiving at home, she cannot overcome the status of a second-class citizen in the labor market. Because, as shown in this study, women care workers have to work such long hours and get paid so little.
The penetrating theme of this special issue is overwork. In Korea, strong overwork culture is supported and strengthened by gender essentialist beliefs. The gendered time divide produce both conscious and unconscious bias against women at work, and thus women are segregated into undervalued and underpaid flexible jobs that resemble domestic tasks. Youngjoo Cha and Kim Weeden convincingly demonstrate that overwork is a gendered phenomenon with gendered consequences.72 In the context of Korean care services, overwork is also an extremely gendered process in which overworked women care workers do not appear to be even worked, not to mention overworked, while overworked male workers are highlighted and compensated as main contributors of economic growth. The bargaining models of the rational choice perspective assume that a partner with higher earnings [End Page 272] is in more advantageous position on the issue of dividing housework.73 The huge gender gap in wages reduces women workers’ bargaining power in the family and makes them engage in unpaid domestic labor much more than their husbands, depriving them of opportunities to participate in manufacturing companies with competitive advantages that pay higher wages for overtime. Such gender dimensions of shadow labor are bound to buttress both the discrimination and segregation of women workers in the labor market. As a result, the time divide is continued, the gender essentialist beliefs are legitimized, and gender equality is retarded in Korea.
Since official statistics do not always tell us the whole truth, listening to the stories of Korean women care workers was essential to illuminate widespread shadow labor and its key mechanisms in care services. Multilateral labor relations, strong patriarchal familism, discrimination in the labor markets and lack of decent job opportunities for women all contributed to generating consent of women care workers to shadow labor in the workplace. As we can see from the case of older women care workers not wanting to be viewed as poor, however, such consent for some women care workers was underpinned by the fear of being discriminated against for their lower economic status. As a result, while male workers in general endure long working hours for the sake of their families, women care workers work even longer hours for the same sake. A big difference is that women care workers’ contributions to families are taken for granted and not properly rewarded in the labor market and in families. The current Korean care regime bolstered by women’s shadow labor is unstable and dysfunctional. Most of all, Korea’s total fertility rate has fallen below 1 since 2018, reaching 0.84 in 2020, making Korea the only OECD country with a fertility rate less than 1.74 It is a paradoxical situation that strong Korean familism is literally undermining Korean families.
This is an exploratory study of long unpaid and unrecognized working hours in paid care services in Korea, based on the analysis of interview data. Because of its limited number of subjects and the analysis by a single investigator, the results of this article may not fully capture the complicated process of reproducing shadow labor in specific care sectors. To improve the reliability and validity of key findings, they need to be complemented by focus group investigations or large scale surveys. In addition, further research is needed to solidify the concept of shadow labor in the context of gender discrimination. Practices of shadow labor may not be restricted to care services and may differ significantly by countries. More concrete data is required to devise more sophisticated measures of shadow labor and illuminate full implications of such workplace practices.
Joohee Lee is professor of sociology at Ewha Womans University in South Korea. Before joining the faculty of the Ewha sociology department, she was a research fellow at the Korea Labor Institute (KLI). She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her major research interests are gender and nonstandard work, changing industrial relations in a global economy, and industrial democracy at the workplace. Her books include Kojillo Sahoegwŏn [The High Road Social Rights] (2012; in Korean), The New Structure of Labor Relations: Tripartism and Decentralization (2004, with Harry C. Katz and Wonduck Lee), and 21-segi Han’guk nodong undong ŭi hyŏnsil kwa chŏnmang [The Korean Trade Union Movements in the Twenty-First Century] (2002; in Korean), which received 2003 Book of Excellence Award from the National Academy of Sciences, Korea. Professor Lee has served on many government committees, including the National Economic and Advisory Council, Minimum Wage Commission, the Presidential Advisory Committee for Wealth Gap and Discrimination, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Job Commission.
NOTES
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean government (NRF-2013S1A3A2055212). I also thank anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions.
2. H. Kim and Voos, “Korean Economic Crisis and Working Women,” 194. Korean women’s labor market participation rates stood only at around 50 percent throughout the 2010s, while men’s participation rates were about 20–25 percent higher than women’s. For more information, see Han’guk Nodong Yŏn’guwŏn. KLI Nodong t’onggye. The same happened in 2008 economic crisis and during the pandemic as well. COVID-19 caused more harm to women than men. Women’s job loss rate was significantly higher than men’s.
3. Gross, “Plus Ca Change”; Reskin, “Sex Segregation in the Workplace”; England, “Gender Inequality in Labor Markets.”
9. Care shortages in developed countries established the global supply chain of migrant care labor from developing countries, as explained in Corzier, “Careworkers in the Global Market.” For more information on this issue, see Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman. In Korea, paid care work by foreign or migrant labor is fairly limited.
24. “Public Social Spending Is High in Many OECD Countries,” OECD, Social Expenditure Database (SOCX), http://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm (accessed January 28, 2020).
25. Han’guk Nodong Yŏn’guwŏn, KLI Nodong t’onggye. These numbers were conservatively estimated by the Korean Government. According to the pro-labor research institutes, the actual number of nonstandard workers were substantially higher, reaching almost half of all wage earners. For more information, see Lee, “Between Fragmentation and Centralization.”
29. Ibid., 166–68.
43. Nam,“Han’guk sahoe pokchi sŏbisŭ esŏ pauch’ŏ ŭi ŭimi wa p’yŏngka.” Based on the analysis of 2015 Korea Social Service Demand and Provision Survey, Yang Nanju also found that the for-profit agencies variable negatively affects job qualities of care workers. See Yang, “Sahoe sŏbisŭ ilchari chil e yŏnghyang ŭl mich’inŭn konggŭp chojik t’ŭksŏng punsŏk.”
49. According to Sungmoon Kim, the intrinsic value of Confucian familism is “filial and fraternal responsibility.” Unfortunately, a daughter-in-law, meaning any Korean married woman, must assume a full filial and fraternal responsibility toward her in-laws. In so doing, she learns how to extend her fraternal responsibility to total strangers. For more information, see S. Kim, “Beyond Liberal Society,” 481, 488. The Korean care regime exploits such familism to reduce public expenditures on care services.
53. The interview was conducted in Korean by research assistants and postdoctoral fellows who worked for the larger project that investigated service sector workers. The interviews quoted in this study were translated and analyzed by the author.
54. I indicate the respondents’ ages and occupations when their pseudonyms are first introduced in the article.
55. One of them was an assistant teacher working part-time.
56. Among these five workers, one interviewee has worked as a certified eldercare worker and sometimes did these two jobs alternately. In Korean, a hospital-based care worker is called kanbyŏngin and a certified eldercare worker is yoyang pohosa.
57. Of these two workers, one care worker worked part-time both as home care worker for a child and as certified eldercare worker.
58. One care worker had two part-time jobs, and her total working hours were longer than that of most full-time workers.
60. In July 2018, the Labor Standard Act was revised to fully guarantee at least one hour of a recess for childcare teachers. The Ministry of Health and Welfare’s 2018 survey reported that in addition to this seven minutes of lunch break, these typical mid-career childcare workers had additional thirty-seven minutes for a recess. However, according to an investigative news report, childcare teachers were still not able to take any rest while caring for children even after the revision of labor law. Yi H., “Ŏrinijip poyuk kyosa hyuge sigan kanŭng halkka.”
62. Pak, “Tolbom nodongja ŭi kŭllojasŏng”; Yun, “Kanbyŏngin ŭi kŭllojasŏng kwa nodong pŏpchŏk poho pangan”; Yi Y., “Ai tolbomi ŭi kŭllojasŏng e taehan t’amsaekchŏk yŏn’gu.”
63. The number of Korean workers in such ambiguous employment relations has been on the rise since the Asian financial crisis. Employers, seeking greater flexibility and low wages, are eager to transfer risks to workers. Very few social security rights were granted to workers in ambiguous employment relations, but the great internal diversity of ambiguous workers made it almost impossible to find a clear legal solution to protect them. For more information, see Yi C. et al., “Mohohan koyong kwan’gye ŭi Han’gukchŏk t’ŭksŏng mit chŏnmang.”
65. I used the concept of cognitive dissonance following Leon Festinger’s theory that people usually try to avoid disharmony in our attitudes and behavior. Festinger, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
69. The KPTU is the largest industrial union affiliated to the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the more progressive national center of the two peak organizations in Korea.
