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Work and Occupations
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Public Dramas and the Politics of Justice

Comparison of Janitors’ Union Struggles in South Korea and the United States

Jennifer Jihye Chun

University of California, Berkeley

Low-wage, nonstandard service work is an expanding sector of employment in today’s global economy. Although scholars document its effects on increasing poverty and inequality, few studies examine how peripherally employed workers respond to the erosion of their living and working conditions under new forms of employment-centered poverty. Through comparative ethno-graphic case studies of university janitors in South Korea and the United States, the author analyzes how one group of low-wage, nonstandard service workers is transforming their structural marginality into new sources of moral and material leverage. The author argues that unions are staging public dramas that redefine a particular labor dispute into broader violations over justice. Two factors are key to this process: cultivating associational power and symbolic leverage.

Key Words: nonstandard work arrangements • labor politics • union organizing • service • workers • Korea

Work and Occupations, Vol. 32, No. 4, 486-503 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0730888405278950
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