프롤레타리아트와 프레카리아트: 정규직 노동자와 비정규직 노동자의 비대칭성에 관하여

The ever-expanding gap between regular and irregular workers since 1997 in Korea poses a difficulty in allocating the two groups to one and the same class. In this article I will investigate actual factors that make the two groups non-identical(despite their presumed belonging to the traditional “working class”) and other actual factors that make the two identical (despite their distinctive differences). I attempt to conceptualize the asymmetry between the two groups from the perspective of the labor union’s strategic possibility through modifying Swenson’s “trilemma” of the union movement. And in the theoretical instance, it is necessary to distinct the concepts, working class and proletariat or working class and precariat. Irregular workers belongs to the proletariat or precariat as non-working class or non-class. Precariat has a “potential for effacement” that obliterates the prescribed meaning of the working class through violating the existing borderline of it. This multiple asymmetry between regular and irregular workers asks us get out of labour movement that have modeled itself on regular labour movement.