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Rate of Union Membership and Number of Union Members

Last year, South Korea’s union membership rate was 10.3%, representing a 0.1 point percent increase from the previous year. These figures leave out the Korea Teachers and Education Workers' Union (KTU), which the Park Geun-hye government stripped of its legal status as a union in 2013. If the 53,000 members of the KTU were included, the union membership rate would rise to 10.5%, its highest point since 2008.

According to the 2016 Nationwide Unionization Status, a report released by the Ministry of Employment and Labor on Dec. 7, 1,966,000 members of the total workforce (19,172,000) belonged to labor unions, resulting in a union membership rate of 10.3%. Public servants of level five and above, soldiers and police are not included in the union membership rate. After peaking at 19.8% in 1989, this rate fell into the single digits (9.8%) for the first time in 2010 but has stayed above 10% since 2011. That’s the lowest rate among OECD member states.

This was the first time this statistic did not include the 53,000 members of the KTU, which lost its legal status in 2013. The reason for the exclusion was the Supreme Court’s rejection in Jan. 2016 of an appeal filed by the KTU to restore its legal status. As a result, the teachers’ union membership rate, which had been at 14.6% the previous year, tumbled to 1.8%. If the KTU’s legal status had not been revoked, the total number of union members would have been 2,019,000, exceeding 2 million for the first time, while the union membership rate would have been 10.5%, instead of 10.3%.

Ranked by size, South Korea’s national trade union centers are the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), with 842,000 members (42.8%); the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), with 649,000 members (33%); and unaligned unions, with 442,000 members (22.5%). The KCTU’s membership increased by 13,000, even though the KTU, an affiliated union, was excluded from the statistics.

By Park Tae-woo, staff reporter

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