경제위기에 블루 칼라로 전향하는 한국인들

With Wounded Pride, Unemployed Koreans Quietly Turn to Manual Labor

 

 

• 이번 금융위기로 인해 내리막 인생길을 걷는 이야기는 흔해졌으며, 한때 빠르게 성장하던 수출중심의 경제가 글로벌 경기하강으로 타격을 입은 한국에는 그런 이야기가 더욱 많아

  • 그러나 한국에서는 전직 화이트 칼라 근로자들이 상대적으로 보수가 좋은 육체노동으로 전향하는 등 (다른 나라와)구별되는 내용이 있어
    

 

 

• 깔끔한 차림에 최신 휴대폰을 지닌 이창식씨는 건설회사 관리자로 보이는데, 지난해 금융위기 발생 전까지 실제로 그러했으며 아직도 가족들은 그렇게 알고 있어

  • 하지만 사실 그는 비밀스러운 다른 삶을 살고 있어. 지난해 말 회사가 부도나자, 그는 시장에서 구할 수 있는 직업 중 가장 급여가 높은 꽃게잡이 어선 선원이 되어 외진 어촌으로 자리를 옮겼음.

  • 이 씨는 친구나 부모님과 통화할 때 일에 관한 주제는 조심스럽게 피하고, 바쁘다는 핑계로 만나자는 제안을 거절한다고 밝혔음.

  • 같은 마을에서 꽃게잡이 어선을 타고 있는 또 다른 전직 화이트칼라 출신 선원은 (자신의 상황을)가족과 친구들에게 말할 수 없었고 이 곳에 도착한 뒤 부인에게 이메일로 만 통보했다고 말했음. 부모님에게 자신이 일본에 있다고 말한 사람도 있었음.
    

 

 

• 경쟁적이며 사회적 지위를 중시하는 한국 사회에서 이들은 육체노동을 한다는 것에 큰 수치심을 느낀다고 말해

  • 일부는 수년간 비싼 사교육과 대학교육을 받고 나서 이처럼 험한 일을 하고 있다는 것에 죄의식을 느낀다고 밝혀

  • 국가가 점차 부유해지는 환경에서 성장한 한국의 많은 젊은이들은 육체노동을 가난했던 과거 부모님과 조부모님 시대의 일부라고 생각해

  • 노동연구원 이병희 연구위원, “요즘 많은 한국인들이 자신은 화이트 칼라가 되는 것이 당연하다고 생각해. 하지만 이런 기대는 블루 칼라 이외에는 선택의 여지가 없는 한국경제의 어두운 현실에 부딪히고 있어”
    

 

 

• 1997년 아시아 외환위기 이래 최악의 실업을 겪으면서, 한국에서는 화이트 칼라에서 블루 칼라로 전직한 사람들의 수가 증가했다고 노동 전문가들은 말해

  • 현재 실업률은 3.8%까지 상승했는데, 이는 미국 기준으로는 낮지만 아시아의 경제 강국인 한국으로서는 높은 수준임.
    

 

 

이창식 씨는 서울에서 커피숍이나 식당에서 일하는 것보다 훨씬 많은 월 약 1,700달러를 벌 수 있기 때문에 선원이 되기로 결정했다고 말해

• 이처럼 급여가 높은 것은, 경기호황기 지저분하다는 이유로 한국인들이 기피하면서 이주노동자들에 일을 맡기는 등 만성적인 인력부족이 나타난 데 기인해

• 화이트 칼라들이 이런 직종에 몰리는 또 다른 이유는 이런 잡일이 대부분 경기를 타지 않기 때문이라고 근로자들과 노동 전문가들은 말해

• 서울에서 작은 선원 중개회사를 운영하는 정승범 씨는 화이트 칼라들이 물밀 듯 찾아왔던 지난 1997년보다 올해가 더 바쁘다고 말해

• 서울에서 때밀이 마사지 교육원을 운영하고 있는 나득원 씨는 올해 대학 졸업자들과 실직자들의 갑작스러운 유입으로 등록자가 50% 증가한 180명에 달한다고 밝혔음.
  
  

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With Wounded Pride, Unemployed Koreans Quietly Turn to Manual Labor

Seokyong Lee for The New York Times

Former white-collar workers have joined the fishermen working in Buan, on the west coast of South Korea. By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: July 6, 2009

KUNGHANG, South Korea— With his clean white university sweatshirt and shiny cellphone, Lee Chang-shik looks the part of a manager at a condominium development company, the job that he held until last year’s financial panic — and the one he tells his friends and family he still holds.

Faces, numbers and stories from behind the downturn.

The New York Times

Laid-off workers were hired as fishermen in Kunghang.

But in fact, he leads a secret life. After his company went bankrupt late last year, he recently relocated to this remote fishing village to do the highest-paying work he could find in the current market: as a hand on a crab boat.

“I definitely don’t put crab fisherman on my résumé,” said Mr. Lee, 33, who makes the five-hour drive back to Seoul once a month to hunt for a desk job. “This work hurts my pride.”

Tales of the downwardly mobile have become common during the current financial crisis, and South Korea has had more than its share since the global downturn hammered this once fast-growing export economy. But they often have a distinctly Korean twist, with former white-collar workers going into more physically demanding work or traditional kinds of manual labor that are relatively well paid here — from farming and fishing to the professional back-scrubbers who clean patrons at the nation’s numerous public bathhouses.

Just as distinctly Korean may be the lengths to which some go to hide their newly humble status.

Mr. Lee says he carefully avoids the topic of work in phone conversations with friends and his parents, and dodges invitations to meet by claiming he is too busy. He gave his name with great reluctance, and only after being assured the article would not appear in Korean.

Another former white-collar worker who now works on a crab boat in the same village said he could not tell family and friends, and told his wife only via e-mail after arriving here. Yet another tells his parents that he is in Japan.

In a competitive, status-conscious society, these and other workers say they feel intense shame doing manual work. Some also say they feel guilty working such rough jobs after years of expensive cram schoolsand college. And many younger workers, having grown up in an increasingly affluent nation, consider physical labor a part of the bygone, impoverished eras of their parents and grandparents.

“These days, many South Koreans think they have the right to be white collar,” said Lee Byung-hee, senior economist at the Korea Labor Institute, a government-linked research organization based in Seoul. “But their expectations hit the dark reality of this economy, where people have no choice but to go into the blue-collar work force.”

Labor experts say the number of former office workers who are moving into blue-collar jobs has increased as South Korea has suffered its worst unemployment since the 1997 Asian currency crisis. According to the National Statistical Office, the unemployment rate has risen to 3.8 percent — low by American standards, but high for this Asian economic powerhouse.

Many of the unemployed can rely on traditional forms of economic support, like living with family. And despite the slowdown, jobs are still to be found in this prosperous society, where the neon-lit bustle of cities like Seoul has not missed a beat.

Still, Jeong Seung-beom, whose small Seoul-based firm helps recruit workers for South Korea’s fishing industry, says that this year is the busiest he has seen, even better than 1997, when white-collar workers also flooded his office.

He said his company, the Sea Job Placement Center, now places about 80 people a month, four times the number a year ago. Mr. Jeong said most of the new recruits were laid-off office workers or university students who could no longer afford tuition. Many of the newcomers are so woefully unprepared for the physical demands of fishing, he said, he tries to scare them during orientation sessions.

On a recent morning in his cramped office, six young men showed up with gym bags, ready to make the trip to Kunghang, near the nation’s southwest tip. Among them was Mr. Lee, the former condominium developer.

Mr. Jeong warned them that they might get seasick or homesick, or even be injured or killed on the crab boats, which can spend 14 hours a day at sea. When he paused for questions, one man in his 20s asked if he could go home during holidays.

“Crabs don’t take holidays,” Mr. Jeong scoffed.

Undaunted, all six went to Kunghang later that day.

Mr. Lee said he decided to fish because he could make about $1,700 a month, much more than he could earn in Seoul pouring lattes or busing tables. The high salaries stem from the chronic labor shortages in these occupations during the boom years when South Koreans shunned them as too dirty, leaving them to Asian migrant laborers.

Another allure is that many of these menial jobs seem to be recession-proof, workers and labor experts say.

Na Deuk-won, who owns a school in Seoul that trains back-scrubbers and bathhouse masseuses, says enrollment has jumped 50 percent this year, to 180 students, because of a sudden influx of university graduates and laid-off office workers.

“Even in a recession, people need their back scrubbed,” Mr. Na said.

At his Dongdaemun Bath Academy, students gathered in a tiled shower room to learn how to scrub naked customers with a pair of sponge mitts. One, Hyun Sung-chul, 48, said he had been supervising 50 workers as a manager at a construction company before losing his job in January.

At first, he said, he hid his enrollment in scrubbing school from family and friends, though he told his wife. When he finally confided about his career change to a friend, he was surprised when the friend confessed interest as well.

“He told me, ‘Teach me when I get fired, too!’ ” Mr. Hyun said. “I think people come into this field only when they are afraid that their livelihood is at risk.”

In Kunghang, many of the new crab fishermen recruited by Mr. Jeong expressed regrets about their choice.

“This is so smelly and dirty, it makes me want to vomit,” Kwak Jung-ho, 33, a branch manager of a cellphone store in Seoul before it closed this year, said as he cut tangled crabs out of a net.

“If my parents knew what I was doing now, they would pity me,” he said. “Now, I look at the ocean and think, I should have worked harder at the cellphone store, and be a better man for my family.”

 

Source : kdi, New York Times