How a Proactive Interventionist Can Make Strikes More Effective: Evidence from the Korean Banking Sector

Copyright © 2013 ChungIL Choi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper argues, through a case study of two industry-wide strikes in the Korean banking sector, that a proactive in-terventionist strike is more effective than a reactive pragmatist one in a union’s response to restructuring. Evidence from the two strikes shows that unions were able to achieve more successful outcomes from the strike in which they engaged proactively by an interventionist mode. In this case the unions identified opportunities, took the initiative and devised effective strategies that pre-empted the other parties before they had fully prepared their restructuring planning. Such a strategic capacity was gained from active organizational learning in unions derived from their previous strike failure