SLAVERY 257had been reduced to inherited indentured servants, Yu Suwon's version of hired
labor may well be an accurate picture of the hired labor that Yu Hyongwon had
in mind in the previous century. Yu Hyongwon's argument that the substitution
of these kogong hired laborers for slaves would not disrupt the norms of respect
and status within the family was, therefore, by no means outlandish.
As for wage labor in the sense of workers free to move around and sell their
labor in the open market, Yu Suwon defined The Rites o.lChou's ninth category
of occupations as the equivalent of contemporary wage labor. This type was
defined in that text as "idle people without regular occupations" (hanmin
musangjik), in contrast to the other eight categories of various types of cultiva-
tors, merchants, artisans, and slaves and kogong hired workers who did have
regular occupations. These people "moved [from one place to another] in doing
their work; they were workers who were hired." Yu remarked that there were
plenty of these people in contemporary Korea in both urban and rural settings.
They were sometimes employed by the state for building walls, or by villagers
for building dikes and sluices, maintaining agricultural fields, building houses,
and odd jobs. He pointed out that Koreans of his time looked upon them as use-
less objects whereas sage rulers of the past (i.e., the Chinese Chou dynasty) had
put them to use, moving them from place to place to fill in for temporary short-
ages of labor around the empire. Thus, he thought of wage laborers as a kind of
lumpenproletariat of itinerants, vagrants, beggars, or idlers whom he sought to
put to work in a more organized and rational way to increase the efficiency of
labor utilization and production in society as a whole. Wage labor was to per-
form those miscellaneous tasks not taken into account by the traditional occu-
pational categories referred to as the regular occupations (san[?jik).
Ostensibly these itinerant wage workers could not take the place of the reg-
ular cultivators, merchants, and artisans, let alone displace all official and pri-
vate slaves as Yu Hyongwon had proposed. But Yu Suwon did argue that their
labor was less costly and more efficient than that of slaves or regular hired labor-
ers. "Thus [these itinerant wage workers] can finish in a few days what it takes
regular hired laborers [kogon[?] a month to do, or for a few coins they can take
the place of ten slaves, and you will not have to pay the costs of food and cloth-
ing for slaves or regular hired laborers."183
He appears to have had a clearer idea of the difference between bound and
unbound wage labor and a better understanding of the potential challenge of
wage labor to slavery than Yu Hyongwon, undoubtedly because of the greater
development of the market over the past century. And yet he was probably less
committed to the abolition of slavery than Yu, and he did not see wage labor as
the exclusive mode of labor as Yu had. While in some respects more advanced
in his thinking than Yu, he was less radical in his antislavery attitude.
Official Slaves: From Labor Service to Tribute Payments
A significant change in the nature of official slaves and their obligations to the