Abstract

Korea’s labor market is highly dualized. Non-regular workers are subject to adverse labor conditions, and unions, controlled by regular workers, usually restrict their entry as allowed by Korean regulations. Our objective is to analyze the union wage gap in Korea considering this institutional setting. In particular, we examine union wage effects using a more recent and richer dataset than previous studies, the Economically Active Population Survey (EAPS) data, that enables us to distinguish union members from voluntary non-members, involuntary non-members, and workers in firms without unions. Our empirical analysis compares the wages of union members to those of different categories of non-unionized workers not only in the mean but also along the wage distribution using quantile regressions. Our results show that voluntary non-members experience a marginal wage penalty while for involuntary non-members it is much higher, a difference that could be reduced by removing regulations limiting non-regular workers from joining unions.

摘要

韩国的劳动力市场高度二元化。非正规工人的劳动条件不利，而由正规工人控制的工会通常会按照韩国法规限制他们的入境。我们的目标是分析考虑到这种制度设置的韩国工会工资差距。特别是，我们使用比以前的研究更新和更丰富的数据集——经济活跃人口调查 (EAPS) 数据来检查工会工资影响，这使我们能够将工会成员与自愿非成员、非自愿非成员和工人区分开来没有工会的公司。我们的实证分析使用分位数回归将工会成员的工资与不同类别的非工会工人的工资进行比较，不仅在均值上而且在工资分布上。