By Jennifer Jihye Chun
The realities of globalization have produced a stunning reversal within the concentration and techniques of work pursuits world wide. After years of overlook and exclusion, hard work organizers are spotting either the desires and the significance of immigrants and girls hired within the turning out to be ranks of low-paid and insecure provider jobs. In Organizing on the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun makes a speciality of this shift because it occurs in international locations: South Korea and the United States.
Using comparative old inquiry and in-depth case reports, she indicates how hard work activities in nations with varied histories and constructions of monetary improvement, classification formation, and cultural politics embark on related trajectories of swap. Chun indicates that because the base of employee strength shifts from those that carry high-paying, commercial jobs to the previously "unorganizable," exertions activities in either international locations are applying new innovations and vocabularies to problem the attack of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods.
Deftly combining concept and ethnography, she argues that by means of cultivating substitute assets of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' calls for within the collective morality of broad-based groups, in preference to the slender confines of office disputes, staff within the lowest degrees are remodeling the facility kinfolk that maintain downgraded types of paintings. Her case stories of janitors and private carrier employees within the usa and South Korea provide a stunning comparability among converging exertions pursuits in very assorted nations as they refashion their relation to traditionally deprived sectors of the crew and extend the ethical and fabric barriers of union club in a globalizing world.
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Extra info for Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States
Example text
By exposing the contradictory and historically contingent dynamics that are part of global transformation, I attempt to uncover “the specificities and power relations obscured by the bland homogenization of global 20 CHAPTER ONE neoliberalism” (Burawoy 2000, 349). Reconceptualizing place as a central site in which struggles over power and resources occur is crucial to identifying the limits and possibilities of change. ” To adapt ethnographic practices to studies of the “global,” I utilize a twopronged comparative historical and ethnographic approach.
In the United States, core working classes, particularly unionized workers in heavy manufacturing and related strategic sectors, are no longer promised rising standards of living and increased consumer power in exchange for industrial peace. Overcoming stagnating profits and improving productivity mean dismantling the “costly” social compacts that previously included workers in the fruits of economic growth. The breakdown of social compacts among labor, capital, and the state in the United States has also weakened the claims of the burgeoning Korean labor movement.
While the age of industrialization strengthened the muscle of the mass strike and the powerful trade unions that carried them out, the transition to service-based economies in a rapidly globalizing economy is shifting the basis of worker power to historically unorganized and disadvantaged workers employed in low-paid, insecure service jobs. For national labor movements that historically built their base of power on more powerful segments of the workforce in manufacturing, construction, and transportation, this means figuring out how to rebuild the basis of worker power from a position of relative weakness as opposed to relative strength.