KJC Korea
Journal Central

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This study asked whether the gender gap in job stability is narrowing in the younger cohort compared to the old cohort. The gender gap in job stability has decreased over the past 30 years. It is difficult to say that the increase in women's job stability was at a breakthrough. However, considering that employment instability among young men has been intensifying during the same period, the government policy seems to have functioned to the extent that it suppresses the intensification of employment insecurity among young women. The gender gap in job security was larger in the primary market, which is the internal labor market, than in the secondary market, which is a competitive market, but the decline in the gender gap was found to be occurring in both the primary and secondary markets. The employment instability of young women is more severe in the so-called “female occupations” where women are concentrated, and there was no signs of improvement over the past 30 years. This finding contradicts the implications of Neoclassical economics that gender occupational segregation is the result of women’s voluntary choices to maximize their own benefits. Policy efforts to resolve the gender segregation in the labor market should be attempted more seriously.

This study noted that the existing distinction between unemployment and employment based on wage workers does not accurately reveal the current state in the youth labor market. Therefore, this study discussed what the meaning of work and turnover experienced by young worker is, and qualitatively analyzed at what point the existing concept of ‘turnover’ does not fit in youth labor market policies. To this end, the youth labor market was analyzed through various empirical indicators, existing studies on youth turnover were discussed, and the case study was conducted on young workers who had experienced turnover under ambiguous employment relationships. As a result, young workers experienced turnover with ambiguous boundaries between voluntariness and involuntariness without unemployment insurance due to the precarious labor market structure. In addition, for young workers, turnover has been experienced by 'expanding' or 'reducing' the number of their jobs rather than moving from one workplace to another. At the time of transition, young workers were unclear whether their economic activities were in employment, job search or non-economic status. The dichotomous distinction between ‘fully employed’ and ‘fully unemployed,’ which presupposes the status of wage workers belonging to the workplace, and the policies based on it were not consistent with the way young workers work. Based on the results, this study derived policy implications for vocational education, unemployment insurance and unemployment assistance.

This paper analyzes the political process of the introduction and the changes of the out-of-pocket maximum in the Roh Moo-hyun, the Lee Myung-bak, and the Park Geun-hye government. It changed from universal application regardless of income levels to enhancement of income differential coverages. The Roh government accepted civic groups as members of policy governance; the out-of-pocket maximum, a long-standing policy demand from the civil society, was introduced and around the end of Roh’s presidency, the existing compensation system became discarded. During the Lee and the Park administrations, the pan progressive camp strategically insisted on free medical care and a cap of 1 million won out-of-pocket maximum for policy clarity, while the two governments subdivided the income ranges into three and seven. The conservative governments and the civil society did not properly have communication networks, which led to not policy cooperation but political conflicts.

Strengthening the publicness of social services is considered as a way of correcting drawbacks of marketized social services. To this end, Moon Jae-in administration introduced the Public Agency for Social Service(PASS). This study examines whether the PASS contributes to enhancing the publicness of social services. Relying on the concept of integrative publicness, this study classify dimesions of the publicness of social services into core publicness, dimensional publicness and normative publicness. It uses reports from the demonstration projects of PASS to access how the PASS implemented those tasks. Although it is in early stage, PASS shows a potential as a policy tool of expanding public infrastructure of social services, changing commercialized culture and practices among social service providers and improving quality of employment for social care services. This study suggests that PASS can contribute to improving the standard of social care services and achieving gender equality as an public agency for community care services.

This study analyzed the impacts of gender norms in society on married women’s labor market performance. The analysis found a break in the relative income distribution of couples at a point where the wife's income is higher than her husband's. And wives who earn or are likely to earn more than husbands tended to earn less than their potential incomes or less participate in the labor market than wives who do or are not. We construed this phenomenon as a burden on the wivies for violating the gender role norms that husbands should earn more than their wives.