Organizing at the Margins brings critical awareness and insight to the plight and political struggles of the women and men who live and work under conditions of economic precarity and social anonymity at the margins of contemporary labor markets in the United States and South Korea. Although widely presumed to be “unorganizable,” these most vulnerable of workers are collectively fighting (and winning) against exploitative and opaque employment arrangements. Although they historically have been neglected by mainstream unions, workers of color (United States), many of whom are recent immigrants, and poor women (Korea) are revitalizing stagnant labor movements, and reaffirming the importance of union organizing at a time when wage workers are under siege. Jennifer Jiyhe Chun's book is not merely a celebratory narrative (even as individual struggles should inspire), but a measured and cogent analysis that is grounded in her keen observation of the convergence of labor movement trajectories in the United States and Korea: the prominence of low-wage, nonstandard workers; social movement–inspired organizing; and the resurgence of symbolic politics.
It is a fine example of the extended case method (as propounded by Michael Burawoy), skillfully combining comparative historical analysis of the relationships among state, capital, and labor (chapters 2–3) with ethnographic case studies of subcontracted university janitors and independently contracted personal service workers (home care workers in the United States and golf caddies in Korea; chapters 6–7). Chun's proposition of the convergence of movement trajectories is not an argument for the totalizing force and homogenizing effect of globalization (pp. 19–20). Rather, the juxtaposition of Korea and the United States functions to highlight the historically contingent and culturally specific dynamics of capitalist exploitation and resistance. Their comparison illuminates a conjuncture of circumstances (from nation-specific institutional frameworks, social movement legacies, to the structured impoverishment of specific populations) that set the stage for “public dramas,” symbolically laden direct action tactics that transform the terms and stakes of struggle from limited workplace disputes to community-wide moral crises (p. 18).
The thematic focus on the revival of symbolic struggles is less a concern with documenting “weapons of the weak” but an astute assessment of the social-cultural, institutional, and legal infrastructure of contemporary capitalism. Long-standing political-cultural ambivalence toward immigration and women's economic empowerment in the respective nation-states has continued to produce a surplus of racialized and gendered cheap and expendable labor (chapter 3). Neoliberal policies have combined with each nation's specific social-cultural patrimony (i.e., structural racism and patriarchy, respectively) to reproduce an invisible and marginalized workforce. Mainstream unions in both nations have been complicit. Revealing their strategic myopia, they have often willfully neglected the fastest growing segment of the labor force—low-wage, “unskilled” service workers—in order to protect the compromised but quickly eroding gains of the more privileged (the exchange of labor peace for social wages and job security in post–World War II United States and post-1987 Korea).
Drawing smartly from Pierre Bourdieu, Chun identifies a significant feature of workers’ present condition—symbolic violence. Low-wage service workers are not necessarily exploited through overt violations of labor law and contract. Rather, formal legal relationships among contracted parties mask the conditions of workers’ immiseration. Subcontracting, a prominent practice of outsourcing to secondary firms, for example, obscures and defers the legal obligations of the “employer,” a category that has become more indistinct, and places workers, according to Chun, in a state of “legal liminality” (chapter 5). Similarly, independent contract workers, such as those in home care services, are caught in a state of “institutional exception,” between and betwixt the legal protections of formal employment, wherein the “worker” is structurally ambiguous (chapter 6). Suffering from irregular employment arrangements as well as from their social marginality, workers’ struggles are simultaneously symbolic and material: “classification struggles” to redefine “worker” and “employer” and their mutual obligations, ethical and legal (p. 18).
Chun's case studies demonstrate that economic relations are also deeply moral ones. Although it is not the author's term, worker struggles may be understood as contests over the relations and boundaries of “moral economies.” Subcontracted janitors at Harvard University, the University of Southern California, Inha University, and Seoul National University, for example, challenged the moral reputations of those prestigious institutions. Their escalation of disputes to “public dramas” claimed workers’ membership in moral communities and rendered visible the immorality of the legal classifications underwriting their systemic abuse. Those struggles, moreover, strategically drew from past valorized movements—specifically, the democratization and militant labor movements in Korea and the civil rights–inspired Justice for Janitors and United Farm Workers in the United States (see chapter 4). Social movement legacies provided organizational, tactical, and symbolic repertoires to transform narrow interest politics into morally charged struggles for justice and inequality.
The case studies are the book's strength, crystallizing its primary arguments, but ironically, they reveal a shortcoming, minor though it may be. While they carefully delineate context, moral framing, and progression, they could benefit from greater ethnographic depth. Although those struggles emphasized rank-and-file mobilization and comprehensive corporate campaigns, for example, much of the analysis revolves around professional organizers and students. The brief snapshots of the workers themselves, such as a middle-aged Korean woman in militant garb, are compelling but not fully satisfying in understanding their identification and commitment. How are solidarities formed, and how did past movement legacies resonate with participants and the public?
Chun's is a valuable contribution to labor and Korean studies. The examination of the convergence of labor movement trajectories of the unlikely pair reveals potential fractures in the edifice of neoliberal global capitalism, points at which “symbolic leverage” may be applied, providing important insight for scholars and activists who are interested in understanding the changing terrain of contemporary labor struggles in the United States and Korea. Well written and researched, it should appeal to students of various disciplines, as it sheds light on a widely overlooked dimension of the global political-economic shift toward neoliberal orthodoxy.
