저임금 여성노동자'와 노동시장 담론

Abstract

This paper aims to answer the following question: “What have been the discursive mechanisms for reproducing women’s low wages in the Korean labor market since the 1960s?” In spite of a great deal of debates, the low wages of women workers and the wage gap between genders did not improve during the 1970s. It seemed that some discursive mechanisms worked to effectively justify and reproduce low wages of women. Those discourses were related to the conceptual simplification of women’s work, the categorization of ‘being under age’, as well as the residual categorization of married women workers. However, in reality, the majority of women workers was semi-skilled or skilled, and these women were not minors. And the fact is that married women workers possessed a lot of job and career experience to be considered skilled workers. Thus, the devaluation discourses contributed to the lowering of the wage level of women workers and reproduction of their low wages. In order to dismantle the negative effects of those discourses, we need to revisit the history of women’s work in the light of women’s experiences and feminist perspectives.