A Fatalistic Hurdle on Female Non-regular Workers’ Class Formation in Korean Context of the Labor Politics : Subaltern’s Resistance Far from the War of Position

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Since IMF crisis in 1997, the accumulation regime including the modes of production has been transformed in Korea. The pattern of a labor movement under the developmental regime is not valid anymore. Facing ‘the crisis of labor,' the expectations for the role of non-regular workers in immaterial labor sector is increasing. In this context, female non-regular workers are deemed as the promising resistant subject whose job is categorized as the unstable ‘affective labor.’ Their subordinated status started to be visualized as the impetus constructing associational power in the labor politics.This study aims to explore the reasons female non-regular workers’ subalternity is preserved despite the support from women’s groups, labor unions and civil societies. Existing researches provide the basis to understand the subalternity of female non-regular workers such as globalization, internal inequality of the labor politics, and the gender blinded discursive interpretation of resistance. I try to explain the lack of subversive power of female workers in terms of class formation as laborers.Class formation is a process that develops along with the collective interests of class, self-awareness as working class, class habitus, and the class capacity to mobilize resources for sustaining the resistance. The construction of class-consciousness determines the maturity of class formation while the process of class identification plays the role to reinforce class-consciousness. In short, the strength of resistance comes from the (proletarian) class awareness toward a struggle.The case studies of clean-up workers’ strikes show the failure of female workers’ resistance. Although activists supported each strike, there is not the development of class-consciousness to deconstruct the oppressive labor conditions. Still, cleaners’ strike could not provide the base of political leverage because they failed to identify themselves as the proletariat.According to examples of strike in this study, the interruption of class identification is the obstacle against the formation of class and it is found in the patterns of the resistance. The failure of females’ class identification becomes fatalistic in two ways. The first reason is female non-regular workers’ position in the gender-based labor market. They are allowed to enter into only the temporary labor market. The occupations are followed by a low wage, poor welfare, weakness of employment protection, and social disrespect. They even have little chance to organize. Even if women workers have resisted, they can not escape their job from the category of low-paid and affective labors. The small victories of associational struggle prove that female workers can hardly deconstruct the cultural common sense that they are unskilled laborers. In fact, female workers are likely to concentrate on the ‘emotional association’ and identify themselves as ‘mothers,' the subject of care work.Secondly, I found that the cultural basis of resistance is constituted with the ‘pure’ sympathy for ‘the miserable cleaners’, unlike Negri, Hardt, and Duluez expected a counter-power to emerge against the hegemony by associational power of ‘the multitude’. This multitude, the supporters of the clean-up workers’ strikes and the argument of the opposition, relies on the value of ‘justice,' ‘humanity’, and ‘ pure sympathy.' Class habitus as a fuel for development of class capacity has been excluded at the first place. They hardly create the unique language of class to resist.This thesis verifies female workers’ situation as the subaltern with examples of struggle. Clean-up workers’ strikes suggests cultural path-dependency of female workers’ class struggle in Korean labor politics. The position of female workers in the labor market under neo-liberalist reformation and internal weakness of solidarity functioned as fatalistic hurdles for female workers to perform deconstructive the habitus. Non-regular workers as the subaltern had tried to organize but mobilized and after all they have failed to establish the war of position against the oppression