IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ctwqxx/v30y2009i3p535-550.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Legal Liminality: the gender and labour politics of organising South Korea's irregular workforce

Author

Listed:
  • Jennifer Jihye Chun

Abstract

Irregular employment (bij[ocheck]nggyujik) has become the dominant form of employment in South Korea, with upwards of 70% of women employed in this sector. This transformation has not only affected the demographics of the labour market, but it has also fundamentally reshaped how unions can organise workers and build collective power. In particular, irregular workers are faced with a state of legal liminality in which workers are neither fully protected by nor fully denied the rights of formal employment, resulting in classification struggles over the terms and conditions of irregular employment. Drawing from recent cases, this paper discusses the limits of masculinised forms of labour militancy and the prospects for developing more inclusive forms of unionism across gender and employment status. Interrogating how workers and their collective organisations are challenging the ‘legal liminality’ associated with downgraded forms of irregular employment is crucial for understanding the new dynamics of economic marginality and social exclusion in Korea as well as in the broader global economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Jennifer Jihye Chun, 2009. "Legal Liminality: the gender and labour politics of organising South Korea's irregular workforce," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(3), pages 535-550.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:30:y:2009:i:3:p:535-550
    DOI: 10.1080/01436590902742313
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436590902742313
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01436590902742313?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ewa Palenga‐Möllenbeck, 2022. "Making Migrants’ Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness From a Multilevel Perspective," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(1), pages 184-193.
    2. Kyung-Eun Yang, 2018. "Unequal Chance of Obtaining a Secure Job: Marriage Migrant Women in the Korean Labor Market," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 19(1), pages 91-110, February.
    3. Cubides Kovacsics, M.I. & Santos, W. & Siegmann, K.A., 2021. "Sex workers’ everyday security in the Netherlands and the impact of COVID-19," ISS Working Papers - General Series 689, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague.
    4. Gadi NISSIM & David DE VRIES, 2014. "Permanent liminality: The impact of non-standard forms of employment on workers' committees in Israel," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 153(3), pages 435-454, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:30:y:2009:i:3:p:535-550. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ctwq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.