From the perspective of Michel Foucault's knowledge/power, this study examines the power effects of Certified Public Labor Attorney(CPLA) on labor issues in the process of establishing the profession of CPLA, which emergedin response to the explosive ...
From the perspective of Michel Foucault's knowledge/power, this study examines the power effects of Certified Public Labor Attorney(CPLA) on labor issues in the process of establishing the profession of CPLA, which emergedin response to the explosive demand for knowledge about labor after the 1987 Great Labor Struggle. The first CPLA were graduated in 1987, and contrary to the expectation that they would become a promising professionin line with the modernization of labor management, they were a crisis profession with few places to find them, leading to abolitionism. The Great Labor Struggle of July-September 1987, in which more than 3,000 labordisputes occurred nationwide, was an opportunity to change the perspective of Korean companies that considered labor management as wasteful. Laborers became an essential part of the workforce, earning large profits and beingclassified as a high-income occupation. Although CPLA could provide practical and legal assistance to workers in matters such as industrial accidents, wage arrears, and unfair dismissal, their assistance was mainly focused on individualworkers' problems. At that time, legal advice on the exercise of the right to organize, such as labor disputes, was a ground for detention under the “prohibition of the third party intervention” in Article 13(2) of the Labor Dispute Adjustment Act. In the end, the establishment of CPLA profession was a process of closely linking labor issues and the law to facilitate the relief of individual workers' legal rights, but it was also a process of reproducing the problematization of labour disputes by isolating the right to organize and the channel of the law.