신자유주의 시대 구조적 폭력의 한 양상 — 2000년대 이후 노동법제의 변화와 노동기본권의 위기를 중심으로 —

Abstract

The concept of violence today has expanded not only to physical violence such as of war and terror, but also to structural, institutional, and cultural violence. The state's monopoly of violence has been legalized as a sign of modernization. But thinking on the violence of the various social systems and civilized institutions themselves that emerged to protect human beings from violence, especially the violent nature of the law which is a specific manifestation of national monopoly, and the mutual implication of law and violence, shows the nature of the “dominance of violence disguised as law”. In particular, the laws of the neoliberal era contribute to maintaining and consolidating of “structural violence” built-in neo-liberalism. As an example of the new 21st century ‘laws that provide causes of a violent society’ or ‘laws that is a means of deepening structural violence’, labor law has played a decisive role in establishing neoliberal economic policies since the 2000s. Galtong, who expanded the horizon of the concept of violence, sees structural violence as a hindrance to human basic needs or rights, such as survival, welfare, freedom, and desire of identity. His concept of structural violence can explain the governance system of power(capital power) that works strongly in human life in the neoliberal era. Foucault believes that the market of neo-liberalism is the arena of competition and that the state is driving the support and encouragement of competition. He saw that humans in the neoliberal market thought and acted as “Homo Economicus” as human capital that had to efficiently produce their abilities. Starting with the Kim Young-sam administration's discourse on globalization in 1993, since the 1997 financial crisis, restructuring and employment flexibilization in the Korean labor market has always been continued. In the process, members of society were reborn as Homo Economicus manages themselves by internalizing the competitive logic of companies that promote low cost and high efficiency The flexibilization of the neo-liberalistic labor market meant the flexibility of labor laws, and the previous governments’ ‘labor advancement legislation’ or ‘labor reform acts’ became a major means of supporting neo-liberal economic systems and labor policies. In order not to lose its boundary with structural violence in neo-liberalism as a dominant tool for the strong and a means of exclusion of rights for the weak, labor law must revert to its original role of protecting the rights of human beings who work.