Dongwoo Park - Research

Dissertation & Book Project

Just Transition from Below: Precarious Labor and the Politics of Solidarity in Korea's BEV Transition

My dissertation examines how the transition to battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) is reshaping employment relations in South Korea’s auto industry. Using a multi-level case study of Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) and its supplier network, I show that the BEV transition has reinforced core–periphery divisions while also creating space for precarious workers to challenge inequality through grassroots organizing and collaboration with traditional unions. The project contributes to debates on just transitions and worker solidarity by identifying the conditions under which precarious workers can promote more equitable outcomes across supply chains and potentially reshape employment relations institutions.

One chapter from this research (Chapter 2 "The making of an unjust transition") received the Sabina Avdagic Early Career Scholar Prize for Best Paper in Comparative Capitalism at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Conference (2025). To offer a more comprehensive global analysis, I plan to develop this dissertation into an academic monograph by incorporating comparative insights from the United States, Canada, and Germany.

Select Working Papers

Reinforcing the status quo or sparking a new order? with Seong-Jae Cho. Submitted for an edited volume, Bristol University Press.

The making of an unjust transition Under review at British Journal of Industrial Relations.

Transparency and supplier labor standards in global supply chains with Chunyun Li, Sarosh Kuruvilla, Yuequan Guo and Lingyu Zhou. R&R at ILR Review.

The career consequences of flexible work policies with Vanessa Conzon, Duanyi Yang and Erin Kelly. R&R at Organization Science.

Publications

Sustainable solidarity: Navigating network and bureaucracy to resist precarity

forthcoming. ILR Review

The transition to electric vehicles is reshaping labor markets as production expands within supplier networks. This transformation has deepened inequalities between core workers, protected by stable employment and collective agreements, and peripheral workers facing growing precarity. This study examines the Module-Suppliers Alliance (MSA) in South Korea’s automobile sector, where subcontracted workers adopted a network-based strategy to improve wages and employment security. The findings show that while network-based organizing enabled rapid mobilization and broad participation during the organizing phase, it proved less effective during bargaining as divergent interests and coordination challenges emerged. Tracing the MSA’s evolving collaboration with the Korean Metal Workers’ Union (KMWU), the study demonstrates how workers alternate between network-based organizing and bureaucratic (hierarchical) coordination across successive phases of struggle, with such coordination introduced during bargaining to complement network-based forms of organization. It argues that this process of bureaucratic layering can sustain worker solidarity under conditions of precarity.

Striking for a just transition? North American auto unions and the electric vehicle transition

with Mathieu Dupuis and Ian Greer. forthcoming. Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society

Decarbonization heightens risks for workers, but union strategies shape how these risks are managed and whether new jobs offer quality employment. This paper compares U.S. and Canadian auto unions during the 2023 Detroit Three bargaining, focusing on strategic capacities and internal politics to explain their divergent responses to the EV transition. Both unions emphasized a just transition and secured significant gains through the negotiations. However, the UAW’s militancy emerged as a compensatory mechanism for weakened capacity, while Unifor’s traditional approach stemmed from organizational resilience. We argue that understanding this counter-intuitive relationship between capacity and militancy is critical to understanding cross-national differences in labor’s climate strategies.

Does voice gap influence workers’ job attitudes and well-being? Measuring voice as a dimension of job quality

with Yaminette Díaz-Linhart, Thomas Kochan, Arrow Minster and Duanyi Yang. 2025. British Journal of Industrial Relations. [link] [blog]

This paper investigates worker voice as a dimension of job quality and examines its link with job-related outcomes. We refine and test a multi-measure concept of the “voice gap” to capture how much influence workers expect to have compared to what they actually have on a set of work-related issues. Analyzing a survey of 1307 American workers, we find that workers distinguish between a voice gap on issues related to their own interests (“worker-issues voice gap”) and those related to their employing organization’s interests (“organizational-strategy voice gap”). Even after controlling for other dimensions of job quality, a larger voice gap is statistically associated with lower job satisfaction and well-being, as well as higher levels of burnout and turnover intention. Additionally, we find that worker-issues voice gap has a stronger and more significant effect than a organizational-strategy voice gap. Based on these results, we recommend incorporating the voice gap measure in future worker voice research and as a practical tool for evaluating voice as a dimension of job quality.

A just transition for auto workers? Negotiating the electric vehicle transition in Germany and North America

with Mathieu Dupuis, Ian Greer, Anja Kirsch, Grzegorz Lechowski and Tobias Zimmermann. 2024. ILR Review. [link]

Reducing human-made greenhouse gas emissions is crucially important for life on earth, but it requires restructuring industries in ways that could disrupt millions of workers’ lives globally. Whether this transition is “just” from the perspective of workers depends on the magnitude of job losses, the quality of new jobs, and the transitions workers experience from their current jobs to new ones. Using the example of the German automotive industry, where the shift to electric vehicle production has recently accelerated, the authors identify recommendations for unions and policymakers in North America and beyond. This article provides an overview of the tools for workers and trade unions in Germany to steer the transition and shows how analogous tools could be strengthened or created elsewhere.

Breaking the deadlock: How union and employer tactics affect first contract achievement

with John Kallas and Rachel Aleks. 2023. Industrial Relations Journal. [link]

The US labor movement faces a potentially transformative moment, as workers have won breakthrough union organizing victories at various high-profile, private sector employers. While winning an election is essential to establishing collective bargaining, unions then need to secure a first contract with employers to make tangible improvements in working conditions. Drawing on a sample of 126 responses about post-certification collective bargaining, we find that both employer and union tactics have significant impacts on first contract achievement. Employers continue to impede first contract achievement by committing unfair labor practices, but unions can improve their chances at establishing an agreement by utilizing tactics that engage the public.

Lopsided inclusion: The impact of multi‐employer bargaining and class‐based unionism on non‐regular employment in South Korea

2023. British Journal of Industrial Relations. [link] [blog]

This study examines the impact of multi-employer bargaining on non-regular workers across different unions and types of non-regular employment. Using national representative survey data from South Korea, I find that multi-employer bargaining increases the likelihood that a workplace union would address a pay increase for non-regular workers when the union was affiliated with a confederation espousing class-based as opposed to business-unionism. However, such a relationship was weaker for temporary agency workers and subcontractors than for direct-hire fixed-term workers. This mechanism is further illustrated through a second round of data collection and analysis, namely in-depth interviews. I identify two factors that characterize the class-based confederation: (1) centralized pressure from the union and (2) activists and their identity work. Altogether, these results further an understanding of how the identities of national union confederations can influence local representatives’ approach to representing non-regular workers and how those influences are manifested through workplace-level collective bargaining.