• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.37-65
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• 2013

This study compares the return to seniority and experience among different groups of workers. Skilled workers in large company appear to enjoy the biggest seniority premium, while non-regular workers and small company workers hardly have any. Trade union did not have significant effect. Return to experience increased especially in large firms. Nonparametric model specification test shows that the biases for returns to seniority and experience of 30 years to be between -25~29%, and -42%~6%, respectively.

• Korean Journal of Labor Studies
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.1-45
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• 2017

This study aims at explaining organizational mechanisms of inequality that has been rising rapidly alongside the proliferation of irregular employment in the post-crisis Korean labor market. It argues that inequality is not sufficiently explained by individual gap in human capital or widespread marketization as such. Social categories into which each individual worker falls seems more important as a source of labor market inequality. Employment types that are composed of regular and irregular employment do not simply indicate the different economic meanings of employment contracts but have rather been institutionalized as a social category of status in the context of inequality over the past two decades. They are also often matched with other social categories such as gender that have created and reproduced greater labor market inequality. We pay attention to the organizational practice of dominant incumbents who make claims for advantages of return based on their exclusive accessibility to limited organizational resources and explain how that particular practice plays a role to increase relational inequality between those insiders who achieve advantageous returns and outsiders mostly irregular workers who are excluded from those resources because of the social categories that they belong to. In this study, we identify seniority based pay as the key organizational practice that justifies categorical differences within the workplace and examine how that particular practice contributes to organizational level segmentation and income ineqaulity.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.125-147
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• 2001

It is expected that labor mobility and inter-industry labor turnover would rise due to the rapid changes in the industrial structure and legal institutions of layoffs after the 1997 economic crisis in Korea. One aspect of economic costs of labor mobility is demise of accumulated skills of workers. Workers' skills could be decomposed into three parts, general skills, firm-specific skills, and industry-specific skills. Using data from the panal data of Korea Labor Institute(KLIPS), I show that the net return to seniority is markedly reduced once industry-experience are controlled for. The returns to industry-specific experience are relatively high. Particularly, the experience in one-digit industry is more important for the white-collar workers, while the experience in three-digit industry is also important for the blue-collar workers. Therefore, it seems that the economic cost of labor mobility would be diverse between the skills and between the working classes.