The realities of globalization have produced a surprising
reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the
world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are
recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and
women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure
service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun
focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South
Korea and the United States.
Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies,
she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories
and structures of economic development, class formation, and
cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun
shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold
high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor
movements in both countries are employing new strategies and
vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization
on workers' rights and livelihoods.
Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by
cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root
workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based
communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace
disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power
relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies
of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and
South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor
movements in two very different countries as they refashion their
relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and
expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a
globalizing world.
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