Labor union membership falls in 2022, first drop in 13 years

[Photo by Yonhap]

South Korean labor unions saw a fall in their members in 2022, the first decline in 13 years, after the government took action to identify and address unions with no apparent operations amid a significant fall in union-covered workers in construction.

According to the data published by the Ministry of Employment and Labor on Tuesday, the country’s union membership rate, or the percentage of wage and salary workers who are union members, was 13.1 percent in 2022 with a total of 2.72 million members. Both the membership rate and the number of members decreased from the previous year, with a 1.1 percentage point reduction and 210,000 fewer members. Union-covered workers fell first since 2009 after years of a constant uptick.

The construction industry particularly saw a rapid drop in union membership. The Korean Construction Industry Trade Union, once part of The Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), recorded 8,000 members in 2022, or one-tenth of the previous year’s number. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (FCTU), one of the country’s two biggest labor unions, also reported 29,000 members in its union of plant workers, or only a third of the number reported the previous year.

The reduction in both membership rate and union-covered workers is attributable to the government’s initiative to address idle labor unions with no signs of activity. The country’s trade union regulation requires unions to offer official data on their activity to the authority every January. The data is one of the datasets reviewed by the Korea Labor Institute, a quasi-government research institution, to compile the relevant statistics.

In January 2023, the Ministry of Employment launched an investigation into the unions that had not submitted their annual reports where it found 41 unions whose 1,800 members were inactive, and 1,478 unions without legal presence. In accordance with labor union rules, the labor authority then disbanded these idle unions following the recommendation from its committee.

The FKTU said in an official statement, “The fall in membership was a one-off event as some unions decided to take themselves off our list of legal unions.”