호주제 폐지 이후 민법상 가족 개념의 기준선화와 노동시장 내 돌봄 접근의 구조화 : 비혼모 가족 사례에 비춘 법의 관계식별 기능

This article examines how law and policy presuppose and structure social relationships by analyzing how the concept of family becomes a baseline—that is, a taken-for-granted criterion—for access to care-related protections in the labor market. In particular, it focuses on the paradoxical persistence of a marriage- and blood-based family concept in South Korean law despite the abolition of the Family Head System (hojuje) in 2005, which formally dismantled the patriarchal family-registration order. Drawing on a legal-sociological case study, the article traces how the family concept was not dismantled following the abolition of hojuje, but instead repositioned within civil law as a ‘relationship-identifying baseline.’ The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, it examines constitutional provisions on the protection of marriage and family life, highlighting their open-ended character and the absence of a fixed family model at the constitutional level. Second, it analyzes how, after the abolition of the Family Head System, the Civil Code retained and reformulated the family concept around marriage and blood relations, thereby stabilizing it as a baseline for identifying legally recognizable relationships. This baseline was subsequently translated into policy language through the Framework Act on Healthy Families. Third, the article demonstrates how labor and employment legislation relies on this inherited family concept when determining eligibility for family care protections, including family care leave, caregiving leave, and related work–family reconciliation measures. To examine the tension between this institutional baseline and lived experiences of care, the article draws on interview-based case studies of unmarried-mother families, which function as an analytical lens for diagnosing how the relationship-identifying baseline operates in concrete contexts of labor-market access. These cases reveal that access to care-related protections under labor law is determined less by the actual need for care or the reality of caregiving relationships than by whether those relationships are legally recognizable as family ties under civil law. Although the family concept appears fragmented across different statutes, the findings show that, in contexts where access to rights is at stake, the marriage- and blood-based family concept of civil law continues to function as a de facto point of convergence. The article argues that, even in the absence of direct rights-conferring effects, law structures the visibility and accessibility of care in the labor market by setting criteria for recognizing relationships. By highlighting the enduring effects of the family baseline that persisted after the abolition of the Family Head System, this study elucidates the relationship-identifying function of law and its role in shaping access to care-related protections in contemporary South Korea.