"Electronics Assembly and the Rise and Fall of the US Developmental Empire in Korea, 1967-1982"

This paper looks at the operations of Control Data Corporation—a Minnesota-based supercomputer producer—in Seoul, South Korea from 1967 to 1982, zeroing in on labor-management relations across this period. During this period, Control Data Korea (CDK) went from being the worst, to best, remunerated US firm operating in South Korea. Control Data management produced the majority of the company’s needs in ferrite core memory at the Seoul plant. The paper will argue that the evolution of shop floor dynamics at CDK can be subsumed by larger political macro-economic trends, specifically: (1) US Cold War geostrategic priorities, (2) intra-dollar bloc monetary relations, and (3) changes in demand regarding the US computer industry. It will furthermore show how affordances for assemblers at CDK—although not insubstantial—were only extended to said workers when they served the interests of the US’s developmental empire. CDK shop floor dynamics can be organized into three periods. The first period (1967-1971) was relatively stable, with this stability rooted in the supportive role of these operations vis-à-vis US developmental priorities in East Asia and South Korea’s export-oriented growth model program. The next phase (from 1971-1979) witnessed an initial radicalization of the shopfloor, in large part motivated by the growing dissent from Korean Christian Church groups critical of Park Chung Hee’s authoritarianism. Despite these challenges—which led to the plant’s unionization—CDK operations continued to support US monetary objectives and South Korea’s export-led growth, in part, through the expansion of computer systems sales which balanced out these losses. The final period (1979-1982), which covers the years leading up to management’s decision to shutter the facility, demonstrates that despite further radicalization of CDK assemblers—which led to a hostage scenario—workers’ demands came too late, in light of a rebalancing of US monetary priorities after the onset of the ‘Volcker shock,’ the Korean state’s movement into heavy industry, and a shift in Control Data’s own product lines.