Neoliberal Accumulation and Female Workers’ Sterilization in South Korea: A Multimethodological Approach

This dissertation purports to identify and conceptualize the notion of female workers’ “sterilization,”a socioeconomic as well as political tendency that has been growing out of the Korean society since around the year 2000. It goes on to expound this tendency as a consequence of the causal impact of neoliberal accumulation strategy employed by the global capital. To this end, the author employed a‘multimethodological approach’which combines the methodological conventions of both empiricism and realism; a path analysis model and structural equation model (SEM) were constructed and empirically tested, while the realist abstractions and concretizations were made to detect the intrinsic structure and causal mechanisms leading to the observed empirical regularity.
The major findings of this research are as follows. First, all the hypotheses for empirical research have been successfully confirmed; the models demonstrated that the neoliberal restructuration aggravated the destabilization of female labor - a process that brought about the privatization of profits by capital and the sterilization of female workers, manifested itself in a decline in the number of newborn babies and a rise in the poverty rate among women.
Second, the realist analysis shows that the neoliberal capital accumulation strategy, as a causal mechanism or force, was originated from the offensive class struggle strategy exerted by advanced capitalist countries’capital in its effort to diffuse the capital accumulation crisis in the late 1970s. Korea had to witness the strategy forced upon itself in the wake of the financial crisis in 1997 and the ensuing IMF crisis management. As a result, domestic business profit rates rebounded to a great extent as the asset size expanded, while workers’earnings further worsened the material base of their families. This contrasting development was a consequence indicative of the success scored by the Korean capitalist class in shifting the strain of crisis and the cost of crisis management onto the working class and the invisible realm represented by their private families through the neoliberal capital accumulation strategy.
Also, according to the realist extreme case analysis, it has been disclosed that the neoliberal accumulation strategy espoused by the capital, which sought to socialize losses and privatize profits by destabilizing labor, instigated the gender ideologies leading to the massive lay-offs and labor market flexibilization; the primary target was female work force, which was relatively cheap, flexible and weak in the class resistance. The distorted restructuration of human resources was justified with gender ideologies defining women’s wage labor as being supplemental to livelihood, secondary, or otherwise superfluous. Consequently, female workers have become the first to bear the brunt of instable, non-regular and informal employment.
Since around the year 2000, when the neoliberal accumulation strategy was adopted in Korea, female workers have begun to show the undeniable symptoms of sterilization; the poverty rate for women has soared while the number of newborn babies has dropped drastically. Accordingly women, the actual agents of reproduction work, failed to secure the minimum cost of producing and reproducing their own and others’labor power, and also losing the ability to produce the future labor power indispensable for sustaining of capital accumulation. These current developments imply that the neoliberal accumulation strategy, shifting the cost of crisis onto labor and women, is likely to fail in its attempt to reproduce the capitalist production relation and system.