Status Threat, Meritocracy, and the Politics of Solidarity in the Seoul Subway

Abstract How do educational credentials, status beliefs, and the labor process influence solidarity? In response to pro-labor employment policies that aimed at reversing precarious outsourcing contracts in the Seoul Subway, a cohort of younger, educated workers organized in opposition. Although their efforts were unsuccessful, the opposition marks a surprising shift in trade unionism. Drawing from archival research, ethnographic observations, and 60 interviews, I find that status anxieties were key drivers of the countermovement. This group of workers rejected the traditional “solidarity” approach in favor of a “skills” approach, citing the violation of meritocratic ideals habituated in educational systems and enabled in smaller, more independent work settings. Using employment data from the transit authority, I show how the resulting politics of skills classifications reiterates and reproduces extant gender and age inequalities of the workplace. This paper provides a workplace-specific case study of the conditions under which cultural beliefs about stratification take hold and raises questions about the fairness and effectiveness of relying on credentialing and education as tools for social mobility, given their role in perpetuating structural inequalities.