Winning Conditions of Precarious Workers’ Struggles: A Reflection Based on Case Studies from South Korea

Abstract

In South Korea, many struggles of non-regular workers, who attempted to organize their unions and engage in militant action to protest against employers’ inhumane discrimination and illegal exclusion, have failed to achieve the desired outcomes, due to their vulnerable employment status and their lack of action resources. In this light, our study examines the conditions that lead to victory in precarious workers’ struggles, by focusing on three attributes: internal solidarity with regular workers, external solidarity from labour and civil society groups outside the workplace, and mobilized protest repertoires. Specifically, this study seeks to identify the configurations of these three conditions that produce successful outcomes in precarious workers’ struggles, in terms of bargaining gains and organizational sustainability. We do this by employing fs/QCA modelling to examine 30 major cases of non-regular worker struggles occurring over a 16-year period from 1998 to 2013.Our analysis presents the finding that the conditional configuration of strong external solidarity, strong internal solidarity, and fewer struggle repertoires constitutes a significant causal path to successful outcomes. This reaffirms the idea that strong solidarity bridging, whether with regular workers that have a different employment status in the segmented workplace, or with labour and civil society groups outside the workplace, is the crucial causal condition for precarious workers to achieve their desired outcomes from struggle. An unexpected finding, however, is that when precarious worker struggles mobilize fewer struggle repertoires, they are likely to achieve the successful outcomes of bargaining and organizational gains. Our study contributes to the theoretical elaboration of labour movement revitalization for the precariat class, by shedding light on the activism of precarious workers, considering that the English-language literature that pays attention to the active role of such atypical workers in staging protests against employers’ inhumane treatments and the neoliberal labour regime is limited.En Corée du Sud, plusieurs luttes menées par des travailleurs précaires, qui cherchaient à s’organiser en syndicat et à s’engager dans des actions militantes afin de protester contre la discrimination inhumaine et l’exclusion illégale de la part de leurs employeurs, ont échoué dans l’atteinte des objectifs recherchés, à cause justement de leur statut d’emploi vulnérable et d’un manque de ressources. À la lumière de ces constats, notre étude cherche à examiner les conditions dans lesquelles de telles luttes sont susceptibles de conduire à des victoires, en mettant l’accent sur trois caractéristiques : la solidarité interne en milieu de travail à leur égard de la part des salariés réguliers, la solidarité ...

Combinations of Conditions for Network Effectiveness: A Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 37 International Development Intervention Cases

“…The most distinctive feature differentiating fs/QCA from standard multivariate regression analysis is that it examines a set relation by focusing on interaction effects among independent variables (causal conditions). Whereas multivariate analysis focuses on the variables that independently affect dependent variables and is interested in the net effect of critical variables on the outcomes, fs/QCA focuses on the causal complexity (Lee & Lee, 2017 ; Ragin, 2000 ) and explores multiple causal paths that lead to the same outcome (Grofman & Schneider, 2009 ; Schneider & Wagemann, 2010 ).…”

“…Two methodological indicators of the analysis model—consistency and coverage—were calculated to evaluate fs/QCA models. For statistical significance, the relationship between the causal conditions and outcome was considered empirically valid if the consistency score approached 1.0, and it was greater than 0.75 (Lee & Lee, 2017 ; Ragin, 2006 ). If the consistency of each case was over 0.75, the causal condition was coded 1; if not, it was coded 0.…”

“…If the consistency of each case was over 0.75, the causal condition was coded 1; if not, it was coded 0. The coverage indicator measures the number of cases that are included in a particular causal combination, indicating the importance of a conditional combination, similarly to statistical strength in multivariate regression analyses (Lee & Lee, 2017 ; Ragin, 2006 ). Coverage score was recommended to be greater than 0.3 (Lee & Lee, 2017 ; Ragin, 2006 ).…”

Informality in action: A relational look at informal work

“…The concept of informal work is different from, but related to, that of precarious work (Kalleberg, 2018; Mosoetsa et al, 2016; Vosko, 2006). Precarious labor is work that is insecure relative to the historical Standard Employment Relationship (SER) that characterized jobs in the core of a given economy (Lee and Lee, 2017); for informal work, the reference point is the basic requirements of law that apply to most employment. Nonetheless, both precarious and informal works are arrayed along spectrums—there are degrees of precarity and informality—and arguably, one spectrum shades into the other.…”

“…Although informal workers suffer from the lack of legal labor protection and social security, many of them exercise their agency to improve their working life and even defy the regime of informality in various ways, as observed in the case studies of this themed issue. In this vein, it is interesting to cast light on how informal workers at the margins of labor markets exercise agency and use “the weapons of the weak” in interaction with capital and the state, rather than remaining passive victims of the regime of informality, and a growing labor movement literature has identified new precarious worker activism (Agarwala, 2013; Lee and Lee, 2017; Swider, 2015; Tilly et al, 2018). This vision contrasts with the classical Marxian perspective on the lumpenproletariat, which views informal labor as a reactionary force on the fringes of the capitalist labor regime.…”