Many Koreans lose credentials as middle-class

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Many Koreans lose credentials as middle-class

Lee Sun-hui, 52, is a female bus driver. She celebrated the New Year by climbing into her bus at 4:30 a.m. for the first run of the day. Over the last six years, she has not had an easy life. Her husband lost his job in 1999 when the clothing manufacturer he managed went bankrupt as a consequence of the 1997-98 financial crisis here. Her family of five had to move into a single-room dwelling. Her husband took to his sickbed because of the shock of the business collapse. In 2001, she decided to apply for a job as a bus driver - hard work, especially for a woman, but comparatively lucrative. She was afraid and tired of trying to keep her family together in an underheated room. She went through education and training courses to qualify for a license as a bus driver, and succeeded in passing the examination. Now, she says, her family’s economic circumstances have improved and she has some glimmer of hope for the future, even though her family has not come close yet to regaining its position before the economic collapse. Ms. Lee is one of 32 women among the 370 bus drivers who work for Seoul Seunghap Co. Gu Yeong-hwa, the president of the bus company, said, “More and more housewives are applying for jobs as bus drivers, although they were rare before the financial crisis.” Like Ms. Lee, many Korean middle-class families have seen their economic conditions decline after the battering of the financial crisis. According to a poll conducted by the JoongAng Ilbo last month, households that considered themselves to be in the middle class numbered 56 percent of the nation’s total. That self-perception was down from 71 percent in the JoongAng Ilbo survey in 1994. The main cause of the decline was the financial crisis. According to a 1999 report by Hyundai Research Institute, the percentage of households that regarded themselves as middle class declined from 61 percent just before the financial crisis to 45 percent directly in its immediate wake. The percentage of households that saw themselves as in the lower economic class expanded from 35 percent to 54 percent. Comparing the JoongAng Ilbo’s latest survey with the Hyundai institute’s earlier findings, the middle class seems to have recovered somewhat. But it is still a relatively thin slice of Korean society, and that thinness has contributed to ideological and class tensions here. “The middle class is a nation’s political and social buffer,” said Kim Yong-hak, a professor of sociology at Yonsei University. “Middle-class people are widely dispersed in the spectrum of ideology, but they have a common goal: stability. For that reason, they play the role of balancer to prevent society from tilting too far to either the left or the right.” The definition of middle class is not a precise concept in the social sciences. Generally it includes factors such as housing standards, jobs and academic achievements of family members in its definition. In the 1980s, the Korean government and most private economists used the rule of thumb that the middle class consisted of families with household incomes at least 2.5 times the minimum cost of living, or whose incomes were at least 75 percent of the average income of all Korean households. Current thinking, reflected in standards used by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, puts households with incomes ranging from 50 percent to 150 percent of a country’s mean household income in the middle class. According to a Korea Development Institute survey based on that OECD standard, the percentage of middle-class households among urban wage-earning households was 68.5 percent in 1997 and fell to 64 percent in 2004. The institute estimated that 1.8 million middle-class people had dropped into the lower class during that period, mainly because of the aftermath of the 1997-98 economic turmoil here. But many institutes say that income alone is not enough to define the middle class. Hyundai Research Institute, in its 1999 survey, categorized the middle class as comprising people who earned at least 2.5 million won per month, lived in an apartment or home of at least 99 square meters, owned a car, had stable jobs and ― perhaps surprisingly by western concepts of the middle class ― were university graduates. The Korea Social Research Center used a more political approach last month, defining the middle class as people “politically liberal but who want social stability.” The JoongAng Ilbo survey suggests that more Koreans than fit some of these definitions believe they have lost their grip on the middle of the economic ladder and feel deprived. That feeling, definitions by academics notwithstanding, could itself lead to a host of social problems. by Special Reporting Team
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