Friday, September 14th, 2007 Gender Politics of Organizing Irregular Workers in South Korea

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ABSTRACT –
The reconfiguration of capitalist employment relations is a central feature of work in today’s global economy. In place of regular, full-time employment under a single employer, the growing proportion of workers can be found in “irregular” employment – that is, employment defined by structural ambiguity over what a “worker” and an “employer” is. Nowhere is this more apparent than in South Korea, where irregular employment now represents the dominant form of work in the labor market, with more than 70% of women employed in lower-paid and more insecure forms of part-time, temporary and irregularly contracted employment.

This paper investigates how deepening divisions along employment and gender are reshaping the politics of labor organizing in South Korea.
Contrary to most studies that emphasize the disorganizing and negative effects of labor market differentiation, I will argue that sharpened divisions are creating pressures upon labor movements to democratize their politics and develop alternative organizing strategies to overcome the interlocking dimensions of gender and class. However, I also find that trade union approaches toward organizing women workers are fundamentally shaped by the gendered lens organizers use to define the goals, escalation tactics and causes of discrimination for irregular workers. Building on the history of militant unionism during the authoritarian period, trade unions affiliated with the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions commonly engage in direct and escalated opposition against employers and the state, which often lead to long-term, drawn out battles between unions and employers and police intervention against striking workers under a neoliberal state regime. In contrast, by cultivating organizing strategies that address the needs of marginalized groups of irregular women workers, the newly formed Korean Women’s Trade Union (1999) are cultivating a new form of worker power based on symbolic leverage.

BIO –
Jennifer Jihye Chun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia/Canada. Her major areas of research include comparative labour movements, global political economy, and the interlinkages among race, gender, class and migration.
She has authored journal articles in Critical Sociology (forthcoming), Work and Occupations (2005) and Economy and Society (2003) and various book chapters on the changing dynamics of flexible employment. Her book manuscript investigates the development of new forms of labor organizing for immigrant and women workers in the United States and South Korea under processes of globalization.