"I asked my seniors how to file for overtime pay, and they all looked at me like I was out of my mind."
Inside the Federation of Korean Trade Unions and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, the two bodies that divide South Korea's labor movement, workplace culture is falling short of what young full-time and on-site officials expect. The result is a paradox: they chose union work to defend labor rights, yet are losing their own rights as workers on the job.
The Korea Labor Institute said on Oct. 4 that its report, "Patterns and Future Directions of Youth Participation in Labor Unions," contains the findings of in-depth interviews with 22 young officials from the two federations. For both the salaried officials hired into federation secretariats and union officers on full-time release from their companies to work in the field, the union was a workplace as well as a space for activism — but the reality differed sharply from their expectations.
For the young officials interviewed, a union was not a place demanding unconditional sacrifice as in the past, but a job where they could work toward public-interest goals. One hired official, identified as A, described joining this way: "I was looking for a place that does some good for society rather than obsessing over performance targets like a private company, and the union caught my eye." Yet the secretariat they encountered as a workplace still carried an ethos that took old-style devotion for granted. Another hired official, B, spent an entire week preparing a solidarity rally until late at night as a first assignment, then asked senior colleagues how to claim overtime pay. "I asked how to file for overtime pay, and they all gave me baffled looks," the official said, describing an atmosphere in which a basic right had disappeared.
Officials facing marriage and child-rearing also voiced deep concerns. C, an on-site official, said: "I married someone who isn't an activist and we had a baby. My family's demand that I focus on raising the child and my conviction that I have to keep up the movement collide constantly." Others said unions were replicating the hierarchies of ordinary companies. D, a female hired official, pointed to a structural limit in organizational culture: "If the company has a top-down culture, the union inevitably ends up top-down as well."
In some organizations, patriarchal practices surfaced. D criticized gender-role stereotypes, saying, "When I first arrived, I was told to tidy up the kitchenette because I was the youngest woman." Multilayered sign-off chains in federation secretariats and seniority-driven culture in the field also sapped their motivation. E, a hired official, said: "Even when I want to try a new youth program, it goes through five levels of approval — from team head to division head, bureau head, director general and vice president." The official called it "an extremely rigid hierarchical structure." At meetings of workplace-level unions, too, raising a dissenting view drew rebukes: "What do you know about the field? Let's just do it my way this time," said F, an on-site official, while G, another on-site official, recalled being told, "You just don't know any better."
Officials also identified the failure of union work to build individual expertise or careers as a limitation of the union as a workplace. D said: "In a way it has become an organization that just takes complaints, and there's no career development anymore." As rank-and-file members in the field came to see union activity as a personal loss, the burden hardened around a small number of young officials. H, an on-site official, said: "There's no one willing to serve as an official. We've entered an era when nobody wants to shoulder this alone, so everyone is hiding." I, another on-site official, described a prevailing readiness among young members to switch jobs: "Even when something is hard, they think they'll be leaving anyway."
The report concluded that the conflicts these young officials face are not a simple generational gap but a structural problem arising from unions' failure to offer incentives as a sustainable life and workplace. Kim Jae-woong, an associate research fellow, recommended: "Unions must establish a democratic organizational culture centered on deliberation rather than hierarchy. If they cannot guarantee workplace democracy from within, a crisis in reproducing union officials will be unavoidable."
