posted 21 years ago
Originally posted by herb slocomb:
By law, any contract can be changed at any time with the agreement of both parties under any legal system I know of. - I was thinking of specific cases where employers simply have no respect for a contract. Its common for a school owner in Korea to laugh in the face of some poor teacher who claims that a contract is not being honoured (not paid on time, extending work hours and demanding overtime, refusing severence pay over dodgy claims). In these cases, contracts are used simply to lure people and there's never much intention to stick to them on the part of the employer. Trying to enforce them legally is very difficult often fruitless, and other means (such as recording phone conversations) are used by teachers to get their contracts honoured. Of course this doesn't happen in big business (banks, telephone companies, etc) or indeed international business - otherwise no country on Earth would do business with them and they'd be screwed. Things are much better now, but there's a distinct difference in the general perception of a contract when compared to the West. Probably a throwback to times where all contracts were verbal. I get the impression that Koreans (specifically older generations) simply find written contracts distasteful, since there is no way of "saving face" when presented with one as proof you have somehow not lived up to your obligations.
I was originally thinking the concepts of democracy led to or facilitated concepts of individual autonomy and freedom, which led to the concepts of capitalism. In the case of Korea, they didn't go through that process in that order, but this would not prevent them from importing the final fruits of that process, capitalism, from others who did. - I think it just shows that the relationships are very complicated and capitalism/industrial development cannot be reduced to any one thing. In the case of Korea, the public demanded a democratic government and achieved it relatively bloodlessly although there were many violent demonstrations and many political prisoners. Many theorists believe that democracy requires a population of economically independent people in order to grow.
