The 'people House' and a New Move to Organize 'resident Workers' in Korea

Recently, a region has become a major area for labor union organizing and its activities in Korean labor movement. The vast majority of workers in small firms located in local regions are both non-union workers and precarious workers. A new move to recognize and organize them as ‘resident workers’ has appeared. The ‘People House’( ‘minjunguijip’ in Korean), which provides a space for workers, residents, progressive party members, labor unions, and community organizations to meet and communicate each other and to form networks among them, was established in several wards of Seoul, in Incheon and Kwangju after 2008. The ‘People House’ considers that labor market for non-regular workers is formed based on the locality which they live including neighboring towns. Therefore, it tries to approach labor and livelihood issues of regional workers from a point of view of ‘resident workers’. It provides a space to workers who want to study labor law and to fight for improving their labor conditions. It holds events for residents to meet and talk about labor rights and current social-economic issues such as rail privatization. It also supports small labor unions in the region which have no union office by providing a meeting space, as well as making efforts to organizing ‘resident workers’.

  This paper has aims to examine practices of the ‘People House’ to organize ‘resident workers’ and to discuss implications of the practices for revitalization of Korean labor movement. Furthermore, this paper compares the ‘People House’ in Korea and ‘worker center’ in the United States which is community-based organization that engages in grassroots organizing to provide support to low-wage workers and discusses similarities and differences of the two.