Reforming Public Officials’ Councils into the Model of Participative Decision-Making: For Labor-Management Cooperation in the S. Korean Government

The purpose of this study is to find how to revive Public Officials‟ Councils into the institutional model of Participative Decision-Making (PDM) in the South Korean government. To do so, the study reviews how the Councils have been inactive or nominal without power clearly given by any law so far and why, and proposes how to take after the successful case of Labor-Management Council as a form of PDM in the private sector. Generally, unions and councils tend to drive labor-management relations into adversarial and cooperative ones, respectively. Furthermore, Public Officials‟ Councils are overlapped with their Unions in terms of purpose and eligible membership. To avoid the conflict and inefficiency, the government needs to build three legal bases of the Council: clarifying participation and cooperation as its purpose, having the public officials excluded from unions to be entitled to the Council, and granting greater influence by allowing alliances among the Councils.