Description

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.

Description

ABSTRACT:
Northeast Asian countries have been engaged in disputes over history. While their historical contentions have caused suspicions and frictions among them, I argue that they have also served as a medium of dialogue that helps establish a common understanding about the individual countries’ contemporary reality and future direction. Historical contentions contribute to such a dialogue if and only if two conditions are met: regional actors recognize each other as legitimate participants in a dialogue about the salient past; and they contend over the past within a common framework of meaning. In the immediate post-war period, the region’s order began as a collection of parallel national spheres where the region’s actors remained within a common framework but without recognizing others’ legitimacy. Northeast Asia, through historical contentions in the 1980s and 1990s, produced an embryonic form of a regional public sphere that made possible transnational communications about the region’s future and each nation’s desires, but it now stands at a fork between strengthening the regional public sphere and fracturing it into a contentious regional sphere.

BIO:
J.J. Suh is Associate Professor and Director of Korea Studies Program at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University. He received PhD in Political Science from University of Pennsylvania and taught at Cornell University. His publications include Power, Interest and Identity in Military Alliances (2007), Rethinking Security in East Asia (2004, co-edited with Peter Katzenstein and Allen Carlson), and numerous articles on military balance on Korea, U.S. policies toward Korea and Asia, U.S.-Korea relationship, and inter-Korea relationship. He is currently engaged in research on how “history wars” have shaped the regional order in Northeast Asia and will affect its future course, and editing a volume on North Korea.

Description

This paper discusses a shift of Korean unification politics from a national to a market utopia. The problematic of unification during the cold war amounted to a national utopia, where national unification was expected to instantaneously realize justice and democracy at all societal, national, and international levels. In the post-cold war era, the utopian politics of unification has been infused with a transnational market expansion accompanied by a new moralism and democracy. Unification in the neoliberal capitalist era is pursued less in the form of territorial and familial union than in forms of transnational market integration that espouse freedom as a human rights. Moreover, the often opposed processes of unification—”economic cooperation” (Kyŏnghyŏp) and “North Korean human rights”—are engrossed on competing visions for the new global capitalist order in Asia . This paper problematizes a new social consensus on the market-driven politics of unification, which I argue is a form of neoliberal democracy.

Hyun Ok Park joined the Department of Sociology at York University in 2007 after receiving Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and teaching at New York University. She was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2005 to 2007. Hyun Ok Park is the author of Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005). Her new book in progress tentatively entitled, “Neoliberal Democracy: Transnational Migration, History, and Post-Cold War Asia,” concerns transnational migration around the Korean Peninsula and northeast China since the 1990s, which constitutes a privileged venue of the Korean nation and a democratic capitalist order in post-cold war East Asia, and specifically an immanent link between them. She is a co-editor of special issue of Boundary 2 on comparison and comparability Boundary 2: Problems of Comparability/Possibilities for Comparative Studies (Volume 32:2, 2005). Hyun Ok Park has published widely on Korean nationalism, colonial migration and diasporic movements, anti-Americanism in South Korea. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including the Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Grant, the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and the University of Michigan Postdoctoral Fellowship .