Protesting Precarity: South Korean Workers and the Labor of Refusal

This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of Asian studies Vol. 81; no. 1; pp. 107 - 118
Main Author: Chun, Jennifer Jihye
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.02.2022
Duke University Press, NC & IL
Subjects:
Asian studies
Capitalism
Democracy
Democratization
Demonstrations & protests
Employment
Ethnographic research
Ethnography
Fallacies
Forum: South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement
Grass roots movement
Labor
Militancy
Neoliberalism
Political activism
Refusal
Resistance
Rituals
Social cohesion
Social movements
Social networks
Workers
South Korea
neoliberal capitalism
labor unions
social movements
precarious work
labor politics
ISSN:0021-9118, 1752-0401
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
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ISSN:0021-9118
1752-0401
DOI:10.1017/S0021911821001479