For most of Korea's industrial era, the labor market operated on an implicit assumption: workers would be supplied to industry, employers would absorb them, and the rest would resolve itself through the gravitational pull of growth. Public employment services existed but remained peripheral, overshadowed by a national priority of cultivating sufficient manpower for export-led industrialization. Unemployment, when it occurred, was treated as a personal misfortune rather than a structural condition warranting institutional response, and the policy infrastructure for managing labor market transitions remained correspondingly thin.The 1997 financial crisis broke this assumption decisively. Mass unemployment, the collapse of the lifetime employment compact, and the rapid emergence of labor market flexibility forced Korea to construct, almost from scratch, a nationwide employment service infrastructure. What followed over the next two decades was a layered transformation: a one-stop public network of Employment Centers, an active labor market policy anchored in the Employment Insurance system, integrated Employment and Welfare Plus Centers co-locating multiple agencies under one roof, and a performance management regime designed to hold both public and contract-out providers accountable for outcomes.