Organizing at the Margins

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.

Organizing at the Margins successfully points to the importance of extralegal tactics used in campaigns seeking to redefine the working conditions of low-wage contract and subcontracted employees who lack the legal protections afforded to regularly employed workers. This well-organized book lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for further cross-national analyses of campaigns that use symbolic leverage in support of the struggles of marginalized workers., In an excellent work, Jennifer Jihye Chun compares concrete cases of labour organization by marginalized workers in these two different countries and situates them within the context of broader shifts in power between labour, capital and the state., Jennifer Jihye Chun's comparison of two seemingly very different labor movements—the militant Korean movement on the one hand and the bureaucratic U.S. movement on the other—reveals striking similarities in their leverage of power for the powerless. In Organizing at the Margins, Chun skillfully examines how and under what conditions marginalized workers successfully challenge their employment status., Jennifer Jihye Chun's rigorous methodology incorporates a masterful blend of comparative historical and ethnographic approaches and her writing is lucid and fine-grained. This book reveals eye-opening connections and parallels between the South Korean and U.S. labor movements’ responses to the erosion of workers’ rights in the face of neoliberal globalization policies. It is a must-read for scholars of labor and labor movements, as well as an engaging text that will provoke students to think about how ideas of justice and morality are forged through protest, state policies, and public sentiments., This book comprises a fascinating comparison of the seemingly incomparable—namely, labor movement strategies to organize marginalized service sector workers in the United States and South Korea. Chun draws on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of classification struggle and symbolic power to provide a substantial theoretical understanding of new forms of struggle in a way that I have not seen done elsewhere; in doing this she demonstrates the value of bringing new theoretical perspectives to bear on labor studies, a field sorely in need of this.

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia.