The major changes introduced by VET programmes were in the areas of performance appraisal and payments systems, life-long learning, and individualisation of work simultaneous to the introduction of new kinds of networks with individually motivated contributions such as seen in the IT industry for software development. Several included elements resemble the characteristics of work in the post-Fordist age, such as new modes of control over the process of work. Some claim that in the post-Fordist production age, the stipulation for skills has become nearly completely replaced by the demand for workers’ ‘knowledge’ (Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994: 83). The new systems have eliminated the core methods for climbing the corporate ladder, making the process more individually initiated rather than managed by hierarchical relations. New work styles have changed promotion and compensation techniques to fit individual performance, which were to be appraised by managers who were equally inexperienced in the new standards (Kim and Briscoe 1997).
Performance Appraisal and Payment Systems
Perhaps the two most difficult requests made by the government for labour discussed by the first Tripartite Commission in negotiation for restructuring of the labour market were labour flexibility and changes to the traditional payment system toward a performance-based system.
Manpower with intelligence, skills, creativity and willingness, and the knowledgeable are critical for sharpening competitive edge in the era of infinite competition … it is becoming increasingly important to lay a solid ground for economic recovery through remodelling corporate infrastructure and creating an atmosphere where workers of ability are valued.
(KOILAF 1999b: 11)
In November 1997, just as the economy began its dangerous slide toward crisis status, the MOL took a renewed interest in vocational programmes designed to achieve the above points. The Vocational Training Promotion Act No. 5474, December 24, 1997 began a trend by changing the titles of the VET facilities to vocational ability development training facilities, vocational training to vocational ability development training, vocational training instructors to vocational ability development training instructors, and in paragraph (2) of the same Article, public VET institutes were changed in name to public vocational ability development training facilities, and vocational training to vocational ability development training, respectively (MOL 1999). ‘Ability’, a relatively ambiguous term used repeatedly in the emerging training institutions, refers to a particular work ethic included as part of training procedures, a new priority toward a less tangible worker power than tangible skills alone. Workers are however expected to assume new responsibilities and skills for the international work standard regardless of their incongruence with the past work culture in Korean corporations and businesses. Green lists the following as problematic areas for an educative scheme of neoliberalisation:
• How to internationalise attitudes within education systems that have traditionally stressed national values and culture.
• How to co-ordinate skills supply and demand in increasingly volatile markets and with the pressures for political and economic neoliberalisation.
• How to generate the creative and innovative capacity required of future leading economies with education systems tra- ditionally stressing passive learning and social conformism.
(Green 1999: 254)
The promotions of new characteristics of labour performance include several elements that contrast with organically ‘Korean’ expectations of workers and evidence changes from Fordism to post-Fordism. Rowley and Bae (2002) observe how core ideologies of human resource flows, work systems, evaluation and reward systems, and employee influence can be systematically contrasted to new characteristics. The core ideologies for culturally Korean work practices include the prioritisation of an affiliate organisation over the individual him/herself; emphasis on collective
equality; and community orientation over individual equity and market principal orientations. Kim and Briscoe (1997) note that traditional human resource management in South Korea is based on the emphasis of group harmony (in hwa). Incentives and bonuses were based not on individual performance but on that of the group. Team spirit was the formula for excellence in the traditional workplace. The new requirements of job mobility and flexibility and the development of professional and skilled workers soon took precedence over manufacturing work skills. However, the ‘flexibility’ rhetoric affects unskilled workers in more negative ways than skilled. While flexibility means lifelong learning and opportunities for some, it means job loss for many more.
A KOILAF publication recommends some ‘basic directions’ for the implementation of a performance-based wage system. Guidelines are designed to:
• Help workers and employers to find common ground on the introduction and operation of a performance-based system
• Ensure that the procedures for adopting a new wage system comply with the law and any counterproductive effect is averted
• Induce a simplified wage system (KOILAF 2002: 11).
Employers and workers were encouraged to introduce a profit-sharing system wherein profits exceeding targets could be shared equally.
Management was expected to reveal expectations to workers openly and with transparency, so they could easily identify what types of performance would be expected. These suggestions aimed to democratise the performance-based system that required an entirely new set of per- formance requirements of individuals to take responsibility for their work and performance in the restructured economy.
Individualism and Life-Long Learning
Traditional Korean culture is said to be more community-oriented than individualistic. However, there was to be ‘no choice’ but for workers to adopt an individualistic attitude and to learn that style of work and other countries that have received aid from the IMF have experienced the same changes and all are facing the twenty-first century. Korea has had little time to account for cultural work styles, or for its Korean ‘spirit’, and will have no choice in the matter because of unlimited competition around the
world, according to Minister of Labour, Mr Lee, Soo Young.13 If labour fights with management, businesses will disappear.
Lee notes that the ‘X’ and the ‘N’ generations manifest more individual characteristics than previous generations, and a higher quality of education will be offered to the younger generation, so this will distinguish the workforce of the future. Employees will need to be ‘creative, and they will also need to be able to adapt to rapid changes in society … employees should be given various opportunities to study continuously in order to adopt self-directed learning methods for absorbing new information’ (Lee, K. 2001: 4). Individualism and life-long learning are crucial worker qualities that will be sought in the knowledge economy, and workers should prepare to demonstrate those skills.
Twenty experts and officials at the Korea Labour Institute (KLI) were brought together in 2003 to form a research team under the Qualification System Reforms Task Force (KLI 2003). The research team intended to come up with visions and innovations for the qualification system and to review changes to VET since restructuring of 1997 and onward. The study notes the shift towards learning for life and work, which is centred on the individual and states that ‘decent work underpins individuals’ independ- ence, self-respect and well-being, and, therefore, is a key to their overall quality of life (2003). The study notes that every individual has a right to VET and compares Korea to several other nations including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, and Spain, whose national constitutions accommodate for this. This ‘right’ is also acknowledged at the international level, for example in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the American Declaration of Human Rights and Obligations (1948). In the most recent phase of VET in South Korea, researchers at the KLI have decided that education is the right of citizens and is a crucial way to find access to employment, reduced likelihood of unemployment, and significant increases in life-cycle earnings.
The study claims that economic, social and technological factors cumulatively account for the growing emphasis on the individual in Korean vocational training and education. Contemporary production of goods and services has begun to rely on human capital, or on workers’
individual and collective endowment of knowledge and skills. The
‘individual’ is the new citizen of society and has been granted the central place in statements of education learning, and training objectives. So the process of formal education and training was no longer isolated to the
passing on information but envisions a society that prioritises a scenario of ‘individuals learning to learn so that they can find out for themselves’.
Factual knowledge itself is no longer enough, but individuals are encouraged to learn how to analyse, access and exploit information and in turn to devise and create new knowledge. Taking charge of one’s own learning and ability to learn is the only way to survive or to ‘live and work in the knowledge and information society’. VET makes individuals employable and productive and helps them escape poverty through mobility and choice. These statements, perhaps, do not sound contro- versial at first reading. But who decides what the VET provided, and to whom? Who decided that ‘individuals’ were to become the primary producers in Korea?
‘Individuality’ was not only part of a new concept of employability, but began to be associated with ‘citizenship’. According to the EU Memorandum on Lifelong Learning (EU 2000), active citizenship refers to how ‘people participate in all spheres of economic and social life, the chances and risks they face in trying to do so, and the extent to which they feel that they belong to, and have a fair say in, the society in which they live’. This incorporates ideas of participation as well as replacing owner- ship, similar to the ownership that is increasingly expected of nations’
development (see Cammack 2001, 2002a, 2002b). Trasformismo as the appropriation of workers’ needs has, in the knowledge economy, renewed emphasis on individuals and ownership of work and production, but ultimately, ownership and power is in the hands of elites, via industry investment and human resources management.
So individuals are now expected to take responsibility for their own employability and the government and elites have declared that VET is an important factor in this process. ‘Life-long learning’ is the way in which workers can adapt to rapidly changing economies over time, and the government (ROK 2001: 42) suggested a wide-spread series of facilities to support and incorporate life-long learning into the very core of Korean culture. National and regional lifelong education centres were to be developed. Libraries, self-governance centres, social welfare halls, human resources of women’s halls, and citizens’ centres were to be strengthened.
A pilot project entitled ‘learning clubs for tuning local culture into lifelong learning’ was suggested. An information network was expected to emerge from this campaign and a database to organise information on professors, lecturers, and education programmes of educational institutions in relation to lifelong learning. One booklet, ‘Occupational World of the Future’ was
proposed to offer workers access to available VET and other forms of education so that they, as citizens, could prepare themselves for new employability requirements in the knowledge economy.