ABSTRACT
Is a labor movement in a democratizing polity an old or new social movement? The new social movement literature developed from the rising articulation and mobilization around the issues of gender, ecology, and peace in Western democracies explicitly places labor into the “old” camp. Labor movements are considered to be old as they purport to represent the working-class interest, which has become too obsolete to reflect the diversified concerns of post-industrial society (Johnston et al. 1994). On the other hand, labor has gained a novel conceptualization of “social movement unionism” from the experiences of new democracies like South Africa and Brazil or those of old democracies like the United States and Canada to capture the broad coalitions of labor and other movement actors mobilized for general social justice agenda. Then, is the labor movement in the context of democratizing Korea on the old or new side of social activism? The organizing argument of this chapter is to show that Korean workers’ movements developed and diversified to include both the old and new dimensions of the movement conceptualization. This chapter discusses the evolution of this duality where a part of the Korean labor movement has become institutionalized by primarily focusing on material and labor rights issues along with another part of the movement that is closely tied to civic activism for intersecting justice concerns.
