White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

[sishya]

Can this happen in USA ? Maybe it is already.

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.

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.
Skip to next paragraph

The Recession’s Impact

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 schools and 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.”

[flintlock]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

Beats starving.

The US worker had better get used to it as the death of the FIRE economy means a lot of white collar jobs(and blue collar!)are not coming back.

I had a Delta pilot tell me recently he had considered getting into electrical work when he thought Delta was going under. He certainly didn't feel he was too good to do it. But I know a lot of Americans who do. A rude awakening is coming.

[sishya]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

One Good thing I noticed is that American mostly do not consider any Low End Jobs as Bad and are ready to do it if situation arises, unlike other countries where there is shame associated with it. So if at all this happens in USA, it will not be that bad.

[flintlock]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

I see that changing. Maybe not the shame felt in other countries, but I know some people who'd let their kids go without rather than work a low end job. Probably more laziness than shame though. Americans love their comfort.

[metalman]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

they went through this 10 yrs ago.

[pwcmba]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

I learned a bit less than 10 years ago to TAKE THE MBA off the resume! That is how you get a JOB!

Everyone, say it with me: MBA on the CV / RESUME = YOU ARE PERCIEVED AS OVER PRICED AND WILL NOT GET A CALL. Take it off and you can discuss your pros later with the job offer.

I found a job after a few years in the early 00s; almost as soon as I made the change. MBA = NO CALLS; No MBA = lots of calls!!!

[pwcmba]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

Feels good to vent and to offer helpful information.

Here is one more - your Alma mater is completely useless in terms of career development services!!! Perhaps you can do some networking but otherwise FORGET IT!

[Jay]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

I see that changing. Maybe not the shame felt in other countries, but I know some people who'd let their kids go without rather than work a low end job. Probably more laziness than shame though. Americans love their comfort.

flint, at least you are one of the few americans who has a useful skill. Good on you. Many people will be wishing they had your knowledge in a few years.

You can join my bunker any day with skills like those.

[Beavus]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

In the US we have migrant workers that service our fields. In my community/county, they pick strawberries, and grapes. Will these migrants become unemployed as FIRE workers become farm labor?

Would that not be the ultimate punishment for a FIRE worker?

Go from $100k+/year to $10/day as a laborer.

[touchring]

Re: White Collar Workers becoming Blue Collar - In South Korea

In the US we have migrant workers that service our fields. In my community/county, they pick strawberries, and grapes. Will these migrants become unemployed as FIRE workers become farm labor?

Would that not be the ultimate punishment for a FIRE worker?

Go from $100k+/year to $10/day as a laborer.

The thing about Japan and Korea is that they got huge restrictions on foreign imported labor, so when the fire economy goes bust, the white collar still can reasonably well paid blue collar jobs.

It remains to be seen what will happen in places with an abundance of migrant workers when the fire economy really goes bust.

More like anarchy like what China is starting to see.