Labor Struggles Research Articles

Economic Crisis, Neoliberal Reforms, and the Rise of Precarious Work in South Korea

This article explores the extensive casualization of work and its impact on the working life of the people in South Korea after the financial crisis in 1997. A drastic increase in precarious workers was an immediate consequence of the neoliberal economic reform implemented by the new democratic government, including the enhancement of flexibility in the labor market and the restructuring of the financial market, under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund. Precarious work in South Korea has dramatically increased in the past decade, including both nonregular workers and precarious self-employment in the formal sector. Above all, proliferation of new types of nonregular employment in the 2000s has witnessed the significant transformation of the world of work in South Korea, deepening inequality and poverty. The extremely liberalized labor market tends to result in the fierce labor struggle of nonregular workers, not entitled to be members of unions, replacing the labor movement of regular workers’ labor unions.

Faculty Activism and the Corporatization of the University

Faculty Activism and the Corporatization of the University Purnima Bose (bio) What are the prospects for progressive faculty activism in the academy today? My comments are based on my experiences at a large, public research institution and should not be generalized for the professoriate as a whole. Indeed, we must be mindful of the different kinds of institutions that blanket the larger academic landscape, from community colleges to for-profit universities, “public” research institutions, and private colleges and universities. After historicizing the corporatization of the research university, I turn to constraints that the nature of the institution places on faculty activism, and I conclude by suggesting a few ways that academics can—and do—contribute to social justice efforts. Despite a long and noble history of faculty involvement in social justice causes, including the civil rights movement, antimilitarism, feminist and labor struggles, and international solidarity campaigns, there is surprisingly little recent evidence of organized faculty activism directed at specific causes. Scholars often attribute this quiescence to neoliberalism, the corporatization of the university, and the cultural hostility toward a professoriate perceived as aligned with the Left.1 While many bemoan what they believe to be the recent corporatization of the university, the struggle over the nature of university education—and whether it should be geared toward the needs of commerce or humanity—dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Marshall Sahlins, David Shumway, and Henry Steck note, corporations and their leaders even then sought to influence universities, and knowledge itself was organized into disciplines out of the necessity, in Shumway’s words, for “trained functionaries to fill out the ranks of the [professional-managerial class].” Central to these dynamics was the desire to suture the middle class to the ruling class by inculcating habits of taste and cultural distinctions through the university curriculum.2 Arguably, the corporatization of the university was realized in its earlier bureaucratization, modeled on commercial industry, and the introduction of departments, faculty ranks, and the implementation of an “accounting system” of degree requirements, credit hours, and grades.3 [End Page 815] We must acknowledge, however, the greater imbrications of private industry and academia today, which profoundly impact the production of disciplinary knowledge, the working conditions of the professoriate, and the material transformation of campuses into “commercial spaces” with an increasingly visible corporate presence. Steck catalogs the saturation of corporate culture in almost every aspect of the university, including the imposition of corporate managerial and fiscal practices on university operations, “the appropriation of intellectual labor for [private] profit,” and the loss of research autonomy at the risk of compromising scholarly integrity. The university’s current mission to reproduce the professional-managerial class and to mirror the institutional arrangements of corporations, in other words, remains continuous with such efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within the university, corporatization has radically altered the conditions of work for the professoriate, in some cases eliminating programs or units in their academic specialties, ratcheting up standards of productivity, and increasing faculty’s general workload in response to the downsizing of academic personnel. A greater reliance on adjunct faculty members has meant that the security and protection of tenure has evaporated for the majority of academics. Moreover, the graying of the professoriate has also heralded larger ideological shifts (contra conservative hysteria about “tenured radicals”) and a political identification away from the concerns of social justice that characterized academics in the latter half of the twentieth century.4 These factors should be understood in the context of the larger social crisis and fragmentation of the public sphere that Jeff Maskovsky outlines in his piece; together they present major obstacles to faculty activism. The exhausting workload, the frantic pace of the academic calendar, the fear of institutional reprisals, and the unrelenting stress of meeting the quotidian requirements of professional responsibilities leave many faculty with little energy or the desire to engage in activism. These trends are apparent at my institution. My university’s progressive faculty group, established in 2001, has organized marches, demonstrations, and over fifty teach-ins on topics ranging from No Child Left Behind to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, academic freedom, and health care reform...

Art and multitude by Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri builds upon the aesthetic theory of thinkers from Kant and Heidegger to Delueze and Foucault with his recent text Art & Multitude, where he applies this theory to possible modes of political resistance and social change. With an analysis of various shifts in capitalist production considered in relation to the central art movements of the past two centuries, Negri considers both the realities of the present labour struggles and the possibilities for liberation constructed through artistic action.

Socio-spatial dialectics of crisis formation and the 1997 crisis in Korea

The paper challenges the economic accounts of the 1997 crisis by stressing not only the role of time and space in the overall dynamics of Korean capitalist crisis formation and fixes, but also the dialectical relationship between capitalist dynamics in Korea and changing conditions of international political economy. Drawing on socio-spatial dialectics, the paper examines the evolutionary aspect of crisis formation and fixes and the role of financial dynamics in deployment of the crisis by drawing on a Minskyan notion of progressive illiquidity. In doing so, I examine how Fordist crisis and neoliberal turns in Anglo-American and Japanese economies co-evolved with peripheral Fordism through two critical junctures: the 1987 Great Labor Struggle and financial liberalization in the early 1990s. The paper argues that dialectical processes of crisis formation and fixes led to new articulations between Korea and the international economy. Within international production networks, Korean firms set their position at the low-end of the high technology tier within regionalized production networks. In the process of building their position in production networks, Korean firms had to rely on expanded liquidity in international financial markets which allowed them to invest in unprofitable ventures in the mid-1990s. These dynamics in finance and non-finance sectors led to a double vulnerability of overaccumulation and progressive illiquidity in Korean political economy that culminated in the 1997 crisis in Korea. In short, what mattered in the crisis dynamics of the 1990s is a coupling of crisis formation in capitalist production with Minskyan financial dynamics that perpetuate progressive illiquidity at multiple geographical scales.

The Gilded Age Wasn’t So Gilded in the Anthracite Region of Pennsylvania

The Lattimer Massacre occurred in September of 1897 in the anthracite coalfields of Northeast Pennsylvania. This tragic event saw the death of 19 miners, fired upon by local law enforcement and a posse gathered from local businessmen. This paper will situate this event amidst the deeply turbulent themes underlying the Gilded Age: race, American exceptionalism and Empire and labor struggle. A project undertaken by archaeologists from the University of Maryland seeks to restore the memory of the massacre, highlighting the implications of this history within the current anti-immigrant politics extant in its contemporary setting.

Tangled up in Blue: Blue Labour and the Struggle for Labour’s Soul. By Rowenna Davis. (Ruskin Publishing, 2011).The Purple Book: A Progressive Future for Labour. Edited by Robert Philpot. (Biteback Publishing 2011).The Red Book. Edited by Éion Clarke, Owain Gardner. (Searching Finance Limited, 2012).

<i>Tangled up in Blue: Blue Labour and the Struggle for Labour’s Soul</i>. By Rowenna Davis. (Ruskin Publishing, 2011).<i>The Purple Book: A Progressive Future for Labour</i>. Edited by Robert Philpot. (Biteback Publishing 2011).<i>The Red Book</i>. Edited by Éion Clarke, Owain Gardner. (Searching Finance Limited, 2012).

Legs in Lukács

Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds), Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, London, Continuum, 2011, 239 pp; 60 [pounds sterling] hardback As one thinker put it, the significance of past movements in thought is established only when the present requires them for understanding its own, defining upheavals. (1) With the work of Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, and Lukacs's Budapest School inheritors, Georg Lukacs never entirely disappeared from notice. But now from within the crisis not of waning capitalism, but of capitalism's relentless ascendance, theorists are re-establishing our need for Lukacs, and his claim on us. This past year (2011), Continuum released two self-contained edited volumes on Lukacs: Michael J. Thompson's Georg Lukacs Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics, and the collection under review here, Timothy Bewes' and Timothy Hall's Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence. Although three contributors have chapters in both volumes, each book is comprised of new and differently oriented essays. In addition to an introduction and twelve chapters, this volume also contains translations of two pithy and--especially in light of their application in several of these essays--extremely valuable works by Lukacs: 'Art for Art's Sake and Proletarian Writing' (1926) and 'An Entire Epoch of Inhumanity' (1964). In their Introduction, the editors appropriate an Adornian design to ask what the present might mean 'in the face of Lukacs'. They sketch compellingly the character of a contemporary situation in need of Lukacsian analysis, but which demands, too, that Lukacs be rendered operational: rethought, critically revised, and perhaps most helpfully, read against himself. The Lukacsian principle of totality is presented as crucial to our judgment of current challenges, precisely insofar as Lukacsian totality interacts with the disunity or dissonance upon which it is established. At the level of interpretation, Bewes and Hall also show that the notion of totality develops out of Lukacs's earliest consideration of aesthetic form, for which contingency is constitutive. I find these to be fine points; I expand upon them in the Afterword to the 2010 edition of Lukacs's Soul and Form. (2) A short review cannot dojustice to any single essay, let alone a multifaceted collection of them, so here I will only mention several connected, axial points from which much of the collection drives forward. There are productive interpretative divergences, for example, between Neil Larson's magnificent analysis of labour and class struggle as fetish categories, David Cunningham's argument that capital, rather than the proletariat, is the subject of history given expressive form by the novel, and Patrick Eiden-Offe's fresh portrayal of the way that class functions as a matrix of imputed, revolutionary consciousness. Yet these essays and others share an essentially Lukacsian insight about the task of the critic, and thus about the critical authority that roots the whole book: for given the long reach of reifying and ideological practices, the responsibility to define existing contradictions and to help engender alternative ways of life is a necessary intellectual condition of any non-reactionary rejection of the status-quo. Andrew Feenberg's rethinking of reification, the cornerstone of Lukacs's legacy, embodies a related theme embedded throughout the collection. Feenberg confronts the economic, administrative, and technological faces of reification, cogently responding to Axel Honneth's recent appropriation. Feenberg deploys reification together with the equally Lukacsian notion of mediation to outline a philosophy of technology sensitive to the underdetermination of technological systems, and thus to their potential for organizing collective action. Feenberg's discussion of the way technical networks construct social collectives and may yet advance their shared interests is invigorating. …

CHALLENGING THE ATOMIZATION OF DISCONTENT

Based on a review of divergent interpretations of migrant-worker protests in China, this article analyzes strike patterns during labor struggles in the summer of 2010. The analysis reveals (1) a shift toward more offensive demands for wage increases and (2) a high level of strike contagion. While these elements were evident to some extent in earlier struggles, the authors see their specific combination in 2010 as an indicator of an ongoing process of “class formation.” The strikes were centered on auto supplier factories, however, and this shows the limitations on cross-sector protest due to the fragmented conditions in China's heterogeneous industrial structure and a continuing ban on independent organization. Taking a broader perspective on the peculiarities of the strike movement, the authors discuss the impact on the government's comparably permissive stance toward the strike movement. This stance created favorable conditions for the proliferation of strikes. Attempts by state authorities to institutionalize worker conflict, while legitimizing the demand for higher wages, fall short of granting rights to organize independently and bargain collectively. Instead an opening has been created for worker militancy rather than integrating it into some authoritarian form of social compromise.

“Filipinos are the Dandies of the Foreign Colonies”: Race, Labor Struggles, and the Transpacific Routes of Hollywood and Philippine Films, 1924–1948

In the 1930s and 1940s Filipino laborers, many of whom were en route to agricultural hubs on the Pacific Coast, packed into movie theaters owned by Japanese immigrants to view Hollywood and Philippine-produced films. These cultural encounters formed an urban public sphere that connected both sides of the Pacific. Filipino patrons remade their public identities and communities through their consumption of film and urban leisure in the western city. This article traces this localized history of spectatorship and exhibition in order to reconsider prevailing understandings of the history of the U.S. West and the rise of cinema and mass commercial culture in the early twentieth century.

Bossnapping: Situating Repertoires of Industrial Action in National and Global Contexts

French industrial relations were shaken in the spring of 2009 by a series of labour struggles which featured the forcible detention of company managers and threats to commit major acts of sabotage. In this article I focus on the first of these two types of action, placing industrial sequestration in the context of the pattern of collective negotiation processes in France, and comparing it with previous cycles of the same phenomenon, particularly in the post-1968 period. I argue that the current cycle of sequestrations needs to be understood as a response to the deterritorialisation processes of neo-liberal globalisation, and is the product of asymmetries of power between the fixity of labour and the fluidity of global capital. I conclude by arguing that sequestration is a public melodrama of protest which might point to the development of a resistant politics of corporeality in France, in common with struggles in other social and economic sectors.

American labor struggles and law histories

American labor struggles and law histories

“The Black and Cruel Demon” and Its Transformations of Space:

“The Black and Cruel Demon” and Its Transformations of Space:

Learning from labour: the space and work of activist theatre

Recent attempts to rethink labour history and contemporary labour struggles in India have variously memorialised the ‘lost worlds’ of industrial labour struggle and argued for stretching the terms of labour historiography, in part, by moving beyond the conceptual and political boundaries of the factory gate to take into account the complex configurations of labour, accumulation and struggle. This article contributes to this scholarship with a methodological focus on political theatre by three organisations in India. I ask what we might learn about labour and labour struggles when we look through the lens of cultural activism by the urban and rural poor. Drawing on Kalyan Sanyal's provocative distinction between accumulation and need economy, I argue that contemporary cultural work and activism both refuses and contributes to the market-based fetishisation of surplus-value as the sole purpose of work and as such it founds a view of labour and labour struggle that learns from labour and not just capital.

On Teaching Harriette Simpson Arnow

On Teaching Harriette Simpson Arnow Erica Abrams Locklear (bio) When I began doctoral study in English at Louisiana State University in 2003, I thought I knew a little something about Appalachian literature. I had read James Still, Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, and several other mountain writers, and I was vaguely familiar with a handful of other related sources, like Joyce Dyer's collection, Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers. Then I took a Southern literature seminar with John Lowe who, during one of our conversations about Appalachian literature, offhandedly remarked that he really loved Harriette Simpson Arnow's The Dollmaker. Before that day, I had never heard of Arnow or any of her works. Looking back on that conversation now, I wonder how this was possible. After my class ended, I read The Dollmaker and was astounded. I remember being completely enthralled by the story in general, but more particularly I admired Gertie's perseverance, empathized with Reuben and Cassie's longing to return home, loathed Mrs. Whittle's treatment of Reuben, and wanted to think more deeply about how Arnow portrayed the identity conflicts that ensued after the family moved to Detroit. I decided to write about it in my dissertation, and later in my first book. I was similarly moved by Arnow's other novels, especially Hunter's Horn. As I learned more about her work, I became increasingly confused as to why she is now read so infrequently by academics, students, and mainstream readers. Upon further investigation, I learned that The Dollmaker won wide critical acclaim during its time and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1955, losing to William Faulkner's The Fable (Eckley 44). Twenty-three years later, in 1978, Tillie Olsen lamented that, as a woman's "book of great worth, [The Dollmaker suffers] the death of being unknown, or at best a peculiar eclipsing" (40). Considering that the novel tells a powerful story about Appalachian out-migration and the consequences of moving from an agrarian society to an industrial one, all while dealing with issues related to education, gender, and so much more, the "eclipsing" Olsen notes is peculiar, indeed. When I talk about Arnow's work with fellow academics, I often hear similar explanations of why they have chosen not to teach her work in [End Page 53] their courses. They usually tell me that while they applaud novels like The Dollmaker, teaching such a long work of fiction seems overwhelming at best and impossible at worst. But in this brief contribution to a longer reflection on Arnow, I want to contest that belief and argue for the inclusion of novels like The Dollmaker on course syllabi for undergraduate and graduate students alike. Certainly The Dollmaker would make a great novel selection for a course on American or Appalachian literature, as it would for a class that explores issues of migration, industrialization, unionization, and labor struggles in general. But here I want to make a case that The Dollmaker is also an ideal candidate for Women's Studies courses, particularly those that rely on literature to broaden student understandings of women's lives and experiences. In 2009 I taught a special topics course at UNC Asheville called Working Women. In it, we explored real and fictional narratives that contained depictions of women's labor, and students interviewed women in the community so that they could examine how their interviewees' stories did or did not align with those that we spent the semester reading. Early in the course,, students responded well to Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative, to Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: A Novel of the Thirties, and to other texts, but I was nervous about introducing The Dollmaker. Were they really going to read a six-hundred-plus page novel? I was not sure. To my surprise, the book was a splendid success, generating some of our best class discussions of the semester. When we encountered The Dollmaker, we had already talked about socially constructed gender roles and the often repressive reality of subscribing to gender binaries. Right away, students noticed Gertie's resistance to these limitations, and together we cheered her refusal to adhere to society's expectations...

Striking Fiction

Striking Fiction Jay Shearer (bio) The Dave Store Massacre. Ron Ebest. Academy Chicago Publishers. http://www.academychicago.com/newsite. 225 pages; paper, $17.95. This ought to be the appropriate moment for a strike narrative or union story—what with half the world rising in popular protest—yet stories of labor struggle remain for the most part rare (at least in the U.S.). Given our political climate, this is not surprising. American labor meets vigorous resistance just about everywhere—public and private, schools, megastores, state capitols, NBAs. Thus a strike novel seems especially welcome at the moment—and one starring a wildcat strike at that, the opening salvo of Ron Ebest's first, the sometimes excessive, often engaging The Dave Store Massacre. (In this scenario, the mostly women employees of the Jackson Missouri Dave Store—Ebest's superstore to beat all superstores—are not union members; they simply walk off the job en masse, unionizing, as it were, on the spot). If thrilling to imagine, this really is the last option for Dave Store's real-life counterparts (Walmart, Target, etc.). The underpaid employees of big box retailers—along with their beleaguered managers—face a brutally anti-labor culture where the faintest whiff of unionization is met with the threat of a pink slip. Although a wildcat action seems extreme, it's both a necessary possibility and strong dramatic starting point. This is politically volatile material for satire—arguably the only material worth satirizing—what can also be difficult territory to tread without resorting to sermonizing or ra ra ra. Ebest shows his colors here and there, but any sermonizing is rare. He trains his eye not so much on the strike itself, but rather on the internal lives of characters observing it from opposing angles, none of them actually striking. There is the notable exception of Magda Fuller, a Dave Store clerk and single mother, recently widowed, the one striker given brief (internal) stage time. Magda's husband was killed in the CushionAire factory murder-suicide noted in the novel's first line (the strike occurs precisely two months after this tragedy; her husband, the factory manager, shot by a laid-off employee). Magda's role allows for an extra angle of revenge in the novel's final confrontation, but mostly she—and others of her position and class—remains a backdrop to those outside the strike, those policing, managing, controlling, negotiating: police chiefs, mayors, city attorneys; Dave Store managers, founders and heirs, as well as the lethally armed posse that protects them (a crew of retired cops and servicemen unironically known as the "ColdTalons.") Why we're not given more time with the actual folk on strike seems a good question—even a vital one—though Ebest does display admirable range with the rest of his chosen cast. His characters are, to a one, entangled in myriad small town soap operas, with conflicted spouses and embattled careers. There is Mary Lively, Jackson's mayor, a Democrat who backed into the job after a sex scandal destroyed her opponent. She works closely with—and is falling for (adulterously)—the police chief, Sid Hatfield, an affable stoner and expert marksman. Mary's husband, C. E. Lively, is the city attorney, a desperate lush whose marriage and faculties are both in decay. The novel begins and ends with these three, in fact (C. E. goes to a coffee shop to inform the mayor and police chief about the strike), though you wouldn't necessarily call them the novel's center. Anchors maybe, but not centers. Center, here, is hard to pin. Through Ebest's roaming, arch omniscience, the protagonist emerges as not so much the Strike itself (as it is, for example, in Ousmane's classic strike novel God's Bits of Wood [1960])—but rather the conflict among the managing periphery, the "upper" struggle, as it were, where store managers lose control and Big Guns of all variety are swiftly called in for back up. The manager in question is Lucas McCain Cantor, on whose watch these workers have launched a strike—an unpardonable failing in Dave Store culture (as it is in Walmart's). Lucas comes fit with...

Reaction to R. Andrés Guzmán’s “From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses ”

Reaction to R. Andrés Guzmán’s “From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses ”

From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses

From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses

The Leading Labor Historian in the United States

David Montgomery, the leading labor historian in the United States, died on December 2, 2011, at age eighty-four. His many articles and books, especially Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872; Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles; and The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925, profoundly reshaped our understanding of the history of American workers.

Telling Stories in Contemporary Spain: A Survey of Women Writing Literary Journalism

T he tradition of literary journalism in Spain stretches back to at least the nineteenth century, when Mariano Jose de Larra regularly wielded his often-biting satire to comment on current events and customs. Since then, male writers have tended to dominate Spanish journalism, particularly in the general-interest press. With the exception of a handful of nineteenth-century trailblazers, most women writers either wrote poetry, prose fiction, or participated in such nonfiction publications as fashion and home magazines until the early twentieth century. At that time, writers like Emilia Pardo Bazan and Margarita Nelken distinguished themselves as journalists and feminist activists. Although the early women’s movement was interrupted by the civil war (1936– 39) and experienced a long, oppressive hiatus under the authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco (1939–75), women’s voices began to appear in magazines and to be heard on the streets in the late 1960s, and became more present in public discourse after Franco’s death in November 1975. The death of the dictator, and with him the authoritarian regime that trained women to be good, Catholic wives and mothers, led to an unprecedented opening of Spanish culture and society, a quick and mostly nonviolent transition (1975–82) from authoritarian rule to a constitutional monarchy, and more rights for women. No longer subject to state censorship, print journalism played a prominent role in reflecting and shaping the changing society. It especially provided a medium through which women could participate in public discourse and begin to make their voices heard on issues as important as women’s rights, abuses in prisons, or labor struggles. Since this key moment in history for Spanish women, and for Spaniards in general, female journalists have continued to collaborate in general-interest periodicals as well as in specialized publications.1 Indeed, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen an increase in the visibility of women journalists who contribute regularly to general-interest newspapers with regular columns, essays, special reports, in-depth interviews, and chronicles. Four of the more prominent female journalists who have been writing literary journalism throughout the last decade illustrate some important Telling Stories in Contemporary Spain: A Survey of Women Writing Literary Journalism

The railroad strike of 1927: labor and law after the Mexican Revolution

Mexico's rail workers’ struggle of 1926–27 encompassed one of the largest strikes following the 1910–20 revolution, yet contemporary official government statistics omitted any mention of it. The labor struggle involved an independent, militant confederation of transport workers and, opposed to it, the largest rail company in the country (heavily indebted to foreign creditors), the state, and its principal labor ally. While the strike was broken, the confederation leading it obtained an impressive judgment from the nation's supreme court against the authoritarian federal executive power, which, moreover, vindicated the right to strike affirmed in the 1917 Constitution. But the judicial and administrative decisions reached in connection with the strike subsequently served to structure and limit labor's right to strike. This article analyzes the railroad strike of 1927, the judicial and administrative response to it, and its legal significance, which together have contributed to the formation of the nation's post-revolutionary system of regulating industrial conflict.