Workers in Barricades and Mayors on Bicycles: Subway Strikes and Race, Class, Gender Politics in New York City and Seoul

Youbin Kang, University of Wisconsin - Madison

This paper compares two significant public transit strikes in contexts tightly constrained by fiscal crisis and austerity in New York City in 1980 and Seoul in 1999. It discusses the shifts in governance that happened under fiscal crisis, their impacts on municipal funding for public services, their race, class, gender implications, the process through which public transit unions decided to strike, and the ramifications of the strike on austerity. The State’s management of urban populations, through both discipline and social welfare, are carried out through the process of contestation where organized public transit workers have incredible agency in shifting broad-based policies beyond the subway, whether they intend to, as in the case of Seoul, or not, as in the case of New York. Furthermore, the comparative analysis illustrates that the differential ways that urban populations are racialized, classed, and gendered, have significant bearings on ways that global financial capitalism can be contested.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 13. Labor Movements and Configurations of Racial Capitalism: Theorizing Race, Class, Gender in historical change