Suchergebnisse

Violence against marriage migrants became a critical social issue in South Korea in the late 2000s, and the government instituted various measures in response, partially adopting civil society organisations' demands to protect migrant women. However, men's rights groups also mobilised shortly after to advocate for the rights of citizen-husbands under the slogan of 'male victims of international marriages'. Their campaigns targeted both the unscrupulous commercial matchmakers and their deceitful migrant wives. This article situates the victimised men discourse as a backlash against violence against women campaigns to reverse policy gains in the protection of women's rights. The article argues that government policies have legitimised such discourse and used flawed 'data' to justify their policies. This article uses as data complaints submitted to the Korea Consumer Agency, a government regulator for consumer disputes, about international marriages and focuses on their mentioning of sexual relations, intimacy and sexuality. By doing so, this article demonstrates that men's rights as consumers of marriage brokerage services are behind their claims of victimhood, and the victimhood discourse undermines the safety and human rights of migrant women. Moreover, a close look at the database about 'male victimhood' reveals severe human rights violations against migrant women.

Marriages between South Korean men and women from less affluent Asian countries have been popular since the 1990s, and commercial international marriage brokers have played an important role in the trend. This article argues that the laws and regulations governing marriage brokers, such as Marriage Brokers Business Management Act (MBBMA) and consumer protection mechanisms, have reinforced the rights of citizen-husbands and legitimized claims from the men's movement. As a result, the state's regulation of commercial matchmaking endorses a form of commodified intimacy and protects the rights of male client-cum-"head of the family," despite the consequences of commodifying the personhood of migrant women and legitimizing the violence of denying their personal autonomy. Data include public documents and policies from the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Korea Institute for Healthy Family, Korea Consumer Agency, Fair Trade Commission, and MBBMA. Analysis of these public texts reveals the legal and policy language that sanitizes and disguises unequal gender roles and discrimination against foreigners.

This article examines how unions build worker power for day laborers in South Korea's construction industry in the context of widespread informality. Drawing upon regional case studies of the Korean Construction Workers Union (KCWU), we find that construction day laborers experience poor working conditions and rampant employment violations under multiple layers of subcontracting that enable capital to bypass existing labor laws and regulations. Despite the regulatory challenges of complex subcontracting systems, unions can still exert direct pressure on firms to improve informal working conditions by securing and enforcing creative collective agreements. Key to this process is the development of regionally-specific forms of worker power that target firms located higher up the subcontracting chain to take responsibility for informal working conditions. Although the scope of influence varies depending on the type of worker power that unions cultivate (e.g. structural, associational, and symbolic), each form of worker power has enabled unions in different regional contexts to establish uniform standards regarding job quality and job security despite formal restrictions on the legal authority of unions as bargaining agents for informal workers. While such approaches require a high level of organizational and strategic capacity, they demonstrate the ongoing relevance of unions in challenging the global turn to informal work through workplace organizing and collective bargaining.