International Policy-Translation Among Precarious Women Workers Organizations :Japan and Korea in Comparison

It was Japan that established the women-only labor union, which was influenced on learning and adopting the main idea of organizing precarious, non-standard women workers from the model of SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) in India, on the one hand, and from the cases of community labor movement in Japan, on the other hand. Korean Women Workers Association (KWWA) learned the experiences of Women’s Union Tokyo (WUT) in Japan, and established a women-only labor union, which is Korean Women’s Trade Union (KWTU) later. On the contrary, Women’s Union Tokyo learned the way of organizing and its role of KWWA, and applied to establishing the Action Center for Working Women (ACW2). Yet, the organizational performance and political impact of the KWTU and KWWA overwhelm those of the Japanese, WUT and ACW2, in a decade.

By introducing the concept of policy translation, this study searches for understanding the different strategies and results in organizing and reflecting interests of precarious women workers in Japan and Korea. The term of policy translation will adopt for describing the process of moving policies, programme, ideas or institutions from one time and space to another. Policy ideas may travel via individuals and organizations. It helps to capture the travel of ideas and their modification at the organizational level and helps to analyze the history of women’s organization, the labor movement discourse, and the drivers in the process of policy influence.

The effective performance of KWTU and KWWA attributes to the organizational strategy of the movement leaders, the solidarity condition within the civil society, and the rise of the new cultural context emphasizing the women rights in the society. These experiences of the two countries show that policy-translation can occur and matter within labor movement, and that its effectiveness can vary according to the strategy, environment and context.