Dissertation
Just Transition from Below: Precarious Labor and the Politics of Solidarity in Korea's BEV Transition
My dissertation examines how employment relations in South Korea’s automotive sector are being reshaped during the transition to battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), focusing on labor market dualism and the strategic agency of precarious workers. Through a multi-level case study of Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) and its domestic supplier network, I show how the EV transition has deepened long-standing divisions between “core” and “peripheral” workers—and how these inequalities can be challenged from below through the collective action of precarious workers.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025—including interviews with workers, union officials, managers, and executives, along with archival documents and on-site observations—the research highlights how institutional and organizational constraints, especially fragmented bargaining structures and limited internal authority within unions, hinder coordinated, solidaristic responses to restructuring. It also examines grassroots organizing within the supplier network to show how precarious workers combine decentralized labor networks with the institutional leverage of traditional unions to challenge precarity and sustain collective power.
By situating the Korean case within broader debates on just transitions, labor market dualization, and worker solidarity, this dissertation advances comparative employment relations scholarship and identifies the conditions under which precarious workers can play a meaningful role in shaping more equitable outcomes in the context of green industrial transformation.
Chapter 1: Reinforcing the status quo or sparking a new order? - Submitted for an edited volume
Chapter 2: The making of an unjust transition - In preparation for submission
Sabina Avdagic Early Career Scholar Prize for Best Paper in Comparative Capitalism, SASE Annual Conference, 2025.
Early Career Workshop Award, SASE Annual Conference, 2025.
Chapter 3: Sustainable worker solidarity - Revise and Resubmit at ILR Review
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, Tobias Zimmermann. 2024. ILR Review, 1-29. [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, 1-19. [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.
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 influ- ence local representatives’ approach to representing non-regular workers and how those influences are manifested through workplace-level collective bargaining.