UCLA

My dissertation examines the unique case of South Korean tenant shopkeepers waging collective actions to protect themselves from dispossession and displacement while mobilizing under their collective identity as workers. Korea presents an optimal site for analyzing when and how the precarity caused by tenants’ lack of rights over their shops—a crucial means of production for tenant workers—can activate the formation of a new class consciousness. This case study pushes the existing labor literature to question the boundary of the working class. With the labor literature’s predominant focus on wage workers, self-employed workers are too often ignored as part of the modern proletariat. Yet, self-employed workers continue to constitute a large proportion of the global workforce in late industrialized and developing countries, and these workers tend to be low-skilled, low-educated, elderly and retired workers pushed out of the formal workforce. The precarity of the self-employed is especially salient in Asia and Africa where the fastest rates of urbanization are occurring, accompanied by intensifying speculation in urban spaces, which exacerbates the precarity of those who depend on urban space to make a living—i.e., independent waste pickers, street vendors, and artists, along with tenant shopkeepers. I argue that the lopsided representation of the working class can create major blind spots in our ability to identify agents of social change. To elucidate the processes that newly led these workers to organize, I combine theories of class formation, social transformation, and social movements from the political sociology literature with an analysis of space drawing from the urban scholarship. I find that tenant shopkeepers creatively utilize urban spaces that their shops occupy by transforming these mundane spaces of commerce into symbolic spaces of political resistance. Through such practices, urban space becomes not only a source of workers’ precarity but also a space for building new workers’ power. I also find that new vocabularies of rights emerge from organizing the previously unorganized workers. Workers’ rights are manifested in rights claims that are conventionally considered urban issues—such as rent control and securing tenant’s long-term tenure rights—blurring the boundaries between urban and labor politics.