Qual Sociol DOI 10.1007/s11133-016-9332-9

In the Shadow of Working Men: Gendered Labor and Migrant Rights in South Korea Hae Yeon Choo 1

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Abstract Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article investigates the gendered production of migrant rights under the global regime of temporary migration by examining two groups of Filipina women: factory workers and hostesses at American military camptown clubs. Emphasizing gendered labor processes and symbolic politics, this article offers an analytical framework to interrogate the mechanisms through which a discrepancy of rights is generated at the intersection of workplace organization and civil society mobilization. I identify two distinct labor regimes for migrant women that were shaped in the shadow of working men. Migrant women in the factories labored in the company of working men on the shop floor, which enabled them to form a co-ethnic migrant community and utilize the male-centered bonding between workers and employers. In contrast, migrant hostesses were isolated and experienced gendered stigma under the paternalistic rule of employers. Divergent forms of civil society mobilization in South Korea sustained these regimes: Migrant factory workers received recognition as workers without attention to gender-specific concerns while hostesses were construed as women victims in need of protection. Thus, Filipina factory workers were able to exercise greater labor rights by sharing the dignity of workers as a basis for their rights claims from which hostesses were excluded. Keywords Migration . Labor . Gender . Social movement . South Korea Katherine Bautista1 came to South Korea from the Philippines in 1999 with an Bindustrial trainee^ visa that assigned her to a thread factory. Her sub-minimum wage salary was routinely paid late, and the factory owner withheld migrant workers’ passports. After a year, Katherine left the factory for a better job she heard about from other Filipino workers. Leaving meant becoming undocumented. Alongside many of her co-workers, Katherine moved to 1

The names of all individuals and organizations are pseudonyms, except in the case of public events and official documents. For Korean names, last names appear before first names. I translated all quotes into English.

* Hae Yeon Choo [email protected]

1

Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga, N. Mississauga Road, L5L 1C6, Mississauga, ON 3359, Canada

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Factorytown near Seoul. She lived there for the next nine years, working at a furniture factory and becoming actively involved in the local Filipino community. Katherine no longer had a legal work visa or a written labor contract, but she was proud that she had been able to hire a labor lawyer who helped her obtain her unpaid salary and severance pay from the owner of the thread factory. Katherine was knowledgeable about South Korean labor law and participated in a protest demanding the legalization of undocumented migrants like herself. Rachel Cruz also migrated to South Korea from the Philippines. She entered in 2008 with an Bentertainer^ visa to work as a hostess in a club catering to American GIs in Basetown, a military camptown. Rachel’s club owner withheld her passport and ignored her labor contract, which promised decent wages and one day off per week. Rachel spent eight months working in this club, watching in dismay as some of her co-workers were sent away to other clubs or back to the Philippines. Rachel contemplated leaving the club to work without a legal visa, but she had no connections that could help her find work elsewhere. Despite her poor working conditions, Rachel prayed that the club owner would extend her contract for another year. Her prayers went unanswered—a few weeks after our last meeting and three months before her labor contract ended, Rachel’s promoter escorted her to the airport and put her on a plane back to the Philippines. How does the practice of rights come to diverge for migrant factory workers like Katherine and hostesses like Rachel given their shared position as temporary labor migrants from the Philippines under South Korean immigration law? Rachel and Katherine faced similar labor rights violations, so why was Katherine, a legally vulnerable undocumented migrant, able to claim her rights with the support of Filipino migrant community and a lawyer while Rachel remained isolated and subject to the whims of her employer? The existing scholarship on transnational migration does not fully explain how and through what mechanisms such a discrepancy of migrant rights is generated, due to its inadequate attention to the gendered labor dynamics that produce different migration and settlement trajectories. This article examines the politics of gendered morality in the process of making migrant rights under globalization. Looking beyond the stigma of sexual morality to explain the vulnerability of migrant hostesses, the article analyzes how migrant rights are shaped by the organization of work under the dominant model of working men. This organization operates through a symbolic politics of the Bdignity of working men^ (Lamont 2002) that partially includes or excludes women workers. By discussing Bthe shadow of working men,^ I aim to highlight the persistence of the hegemonic model of masculine worker-citizens in the labor process and in the symbolic politics that confer dignity and rights, operating as a yardstick in relation to which migrant women are recognized or rendered unintelligible as deserving moral subjects. Based on 18 months of comparative ethnographic research with two groups of Filipina migrant women in South Korea—factory workers and hostesses at American military camptown clubs—I identify the intersecting institutions of labor market and civil society mobilization as mechanisms through which differentiated rights are generated for migrant women who are situated in the shadow of working men in distinctive ways. Migrant women in the factories labored in the company of working men on the shop floor, which enabled them to participate in male-centered bonding between workers and employers, gain recognition for their skills, and enlist support from a co-ethnic migrant community—though not to the same extent as their male coworkers. By contrast, migrant hostesses were isolated, infantilized, and subjected to gendered stigma under the paternalistic control of employers. Furthermore, divergent forms of civil society mobilization shaped the migrant rights claims of migrant hostesses and factory workers. The historical forms of South Korean social movements and their transnational alliances meant that these two groups of women workers

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were mobilized separately with different consequences. Whereas South Korean migrant advocacy groups and trade unions Filipina factory workers are recognized as the familiar figure of Bwoman worker,^ South Korean women’s organizations do not recognize club hostesses as workers with rights and dignity but as women victims in need of protection. As a result, whereas migrant factory workers experience an expansion of labor rights without attention to their gender-specific needs, migrant hostesses are excluded from the dignity of workers as a basis for labor rights claims. These differences illustrate the importance of gendered morality as a factor shaping migrant rights under globalization.

Gendered Labor and Global Migration In the contemporary global era, transnational migration has fostered new political struggles around rights and citizenship. The growing presence of non-citizen migrants within the national boundary provides a political impetus to extend citizenship rights to migrants on one hand and propels anti-immigrant sentiments on the other. Contemporary migration is characterized by the rise of temporary labor migration, under which migrant settlement is constrained by legal and institutional frameworks, intensifying the state of Btransience^ for many migrants across the globe (Walia 2010). Short-term migrant systems are increasingly common in Europe and North America, even among immigrant nations such as Canada and Australia that formerly accepted migrants predominantly as future citizens (Walsh 2014). But this exclusionary model of immigration is especially predominant in Asia. Asia is a key site for the study of migration because the region includes both sending and destination countries and because the region’s mode of temporary labor migration challenges dominant migration frameworks that are based on the experiences of permanent immigrants in North America (Parreñas 2010; see also Cheng and Choo 2015). The transition to a postsocialist economy and neoliberal reforms instituted during and after the 1980s induced migrant flows out of the Philippines, China, and Vietnam while the economic ascendance of late development states such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong transformed those countries into new migrant destinations. On the migrant sending side, the Philippines is now a Blabor brokerage state^ (Rodriguez 2010) that has instituted a labor export policy and bureaucracy to mobilize Filipino citizens for temporary labor migration to multiple destinations instead of implementing structural measures to address the nation’s social problems of unemployment and poverty. On the migrant receiving side, migration regimes in South Korea and in other East and Southeast Asian countries are characterized by a high degree of exclusion from long-term settlement and family unification for labor migrants except in the limited cases of high-skilled professionals and co-ethnics (Seol and Skrentny 2009). The global rise of temporary migration has attracted the attention of scholars examining how the state regulation of legality operates as a mechanism organizing migrant labor, with direct implications for migrant rights. Migration scholars have documented how the state generates various forms of legal precarity (Goldring et al. 2009), creates migrant Billegality^ via restrictive immigration policies that produce disposable and vulnerable workers (Calavita 1998; Coutin 2000; De Genova 2002), and binds migrant workers to a particular employer (Lan 2007). Restrictive immigration policies are especially prevalent in labor market sectors that are disproportionately filled by women, such as domestic work (Constable 2014; Lan 2006) and hostess work (Cheng 2010; Parreñas 2011). In Taiwan, migrant domestic workers with short-term contracts experience a legally sanctioned restriction of rights

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experienced by migrant workers that Pei-Chia Lan (2007) calls Blegal servitude^ in contrast to the Bfree illegality^ experienced by workers who leave their employers and violate their visas. Likewise, the legal status of migrant hostesses in Japan is tied to the terms of their work contract. Rhacel Parreñas (2011) develops the concept of Bindentured mobility^ to describe the paradoxical state in which these migrant workers experience the possibility of upward mobility by being bound to subjugation. By integrating the scholarship on gendered labor with the study of transnational migration, I show how the politics of gender operate in producing different degrees of migrant rights under temporary labor migration regimes. Because the existing scholarship tends to focus on the topdown mechanisms of law and policy through which the state regulates migrants, little attention has been paid to the sector-specific conditions and symbolic politics of gender that shape migrant rights from the bottom up. My comparative analysis of migrant women in the manufacturing and club hostessing sectors provides a unique lens to consider how the gendered organization of different work sectors provides particular material conditions and symbolic resources for community mobilization. This article explains how two groups of temporary migrant workers in South Korea who share the legal condition where their migration status is tied to their short-term contract at a particular workplace diverge in their ability to practice migrant rights based on the organization of their labor and the mode of civil society mobilization that aims to support them. First, I build on feminist scholarship on global labor that interrogates how gender constitutes the social organization and practices of labor. Ching Kwan Lee’s (1998) study of women factory workers in South China shows that diverse institutions such as local networks and families influence the conditions of women workers’ dependence by mobilizing them in gendered ways as Bmatron workers^ or Bmaiden workers.^ In China’s hotel labor industry, a gendered global service work sector, Eileen Otis (2009) found that women workers pursue what she calls the Bdignity of working women^ by distancing themselves from the stigma associated with sex workers. Their pursuit of gendered morality is a constitutive element of the labor regime. In the case of Filipina migrant workers in South Korea, gendered labor processes shaped two divergent labor regimes for factory workers and hostesses. Migrant women in the factories labored in the company of working men on the shop floor, which enabled the formation of a migrant community for mutual support and the recognition of their skills based on male-centered camaraderie between South Korean employers and migrant workers. In contrast, the structure of hostess work—characterized by short-term rotations, competition among women workers, and stigma based on gendered morality—excluded Filipina hostesses from accessing migrant networks and placed them under employers’ paternalistic control. Second, this study enriches migration scholarship by seriously considering gendered symbolic politics (Chun 2009) in the making of migrant rights. Although many scholars have documented the critical role of civil society mobilizations in struggles for migrant rights— including community organizations (Bloemraad 2006; Gleeson 2009) and religious and faithbased organizations (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2008; Menjívar 2006)—they have yet to fully theorize how gendered symbolic politics particular to distinct labor sectors generate conditions that support or hinder such mobilizations. Though scholars have identified workers’ dignity as a significant discursive resource for extending rights to migrants as deserving members of society based on the long-standing connection between work and citizenship (Gordon and Lenhardt 2008), less attention has been paid to how this produces gendered effects. Not all sectors of work offer societal and moral standing and serve as grounds for rights claims; women’s work in some sectors is often devalued as not being legitimate skilled work (Glenn

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2011) or offers only Bpartial citizenship^ in the case of migrant domestic workers (Parreñas 2001). Work in sexual commerce can pose moral risks under the discourses of human trafficking and sexual immorality (Cheng 2010; Choo 2013; Parreñas 2011). As migrant women enter into manufacturing sector work alongside men, into disproportionately illicit service sectors such as sex work, the distinct gendered symbolic politics in each sector play a significant role in the formation of their access to rights and citizenship. This study examines how advocacy groups for migrant factory workers and hostesses are embedded in particular national social movement legacies in South Korea with transnational linkages that differently situate them in relation to the gendered model of worker-citizen, illuminating how gender works to make migrant rights. Integrating scholarship on gendered labor and transnational migration, my comparative research makes the gendered labor regime a focus of migration scholarship. In doing so, this study brings into conversation the literatures on transnational migration and global labor through two interventions: First, it highlights distinct gendered labor processes and workplace conditions to identify patterns of community formation at the local level. Second, it shows how the divergent symbolic resources that are embedded in national and transnational social movements shape subsequent migrant rights mobilization. These contributions provide scholars and activists with a way to envision transformative mobilizations that will challenge the global regime of temporary migration.

Research Setting and Methods South Korea became a destination country in the late 1980s when migrants from China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia came to Korea to fill labor demands for workers in the manufacturing sector (Seol 2005). As a recent migrant-receiving country with almost seven hundred thousand migrant workers in 2009 (Seol 2012), South Korea employs a restrictive immigration policy that authorizes labor migrants only on a short-term rotation basis. In 1994, the government instituted the Industrial Trainee System (ITS), which treats migrant workers as Btrainees,^ precluding them from exercising the labor rights entitled to South Korean workers. The repressive working conditions under ITS led migrant workers to leave their assigned workplaces, so two-thirds of the total migrant workforce between 1994 and 2002 were undocumented workers (Kim 2003). Since the mid 1990s, a vibrant migrant advocacy movement in South Korea facilitated the expansion of labor rights for migrant workers, including the expansion of the Labor Standards Act to industrial trainees in 1995 and the right to severance pay regardless of legal status in 1997. The government finally reformed ITS in 2003, instituting the Employment Permit System (EPS) to provide migrant workers the labor rights—at least nominally—accorded to Korean citizens such as workers’ compensation, severance pay, minimum wage, and the right of association (Kim 2011). Yet the EPS still bound migrant workers to a particular workplace and limited workplace changes. Migrant labor in camptown clubs is situated in a different historical context from the manufacturing sector. Since 1945, the beginning of American military presence in South Korea, sexual commerce has proliferated in camptowns surrounding major U.S. bases. The South Korean state, under the authoritarian regime of the 1960s and 1970s, regulated the camptown sex industry as a source of foreign currency for the national economy (Moon 1997). South Korean hostesses in the camptowns faced stigma and social marginalization (Yuh 2002), but they also emerged as a symbol of South Korea’s national victimization by the US Military

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within the anti-American movement of the 1990s (Moon 1999). The number of South Korean women willing to work in the camptown clubs decreased as South Korea entered its economic ascendance, so, since 1996, the entertainer visa for foreigners in the entertainment industry has been used to bring migrant women from the Philippines and the former Soviet Union into camptown clubs on a 6 to 12-month contract with a possibility of renewal. To comparatively examine how migrant rights are practiced for migrant factory workers and hostesses—two groups of migrants with distinctive labor practices and social perception based on gendered morality—I conducted ethnographic research for 18 months from July 2008 to January 2010. My fieldwork was grounded in the day-to-day interactions in two segregated migrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea—BFactorytown^ and BBasetown.^ Factorytown was home to approximately 350 Filipino workers, among 1100 migrant factory workers from Southeast and South Asia and Africa, about 30 % of whom were women. Four local migrant advocacy organizations worked with migrant workers in the area, and three of these predominantly served the Filipino community. Basetown is one of the oldest camptowns in South Korea and includes an American military camp of 11,000 military personnel and the surrounding club district where about 300 Filipina migrant hostesses live and work. Filipina migrant women were the only ethnic group involved in both sectors of migrant labor, so this group was the focus of my comparative ethnography.2 Filipina women in Factorytown ranged in age from 20 to 50. Some were single, but most were married with children, who stayed in the Philippines. Some arrived in South Korea with an industrial laborer visa or tourist visa only weeks before while others had lived in the country for more than 15 years as visa overstayers. In Basetown, the migrant hostesses I met were mostly women in their 20s and 30s who entered South Korea with the entertainer visa. Most did not remain in Korea for more than one year. Most were single women—at times with children as single mothers—and some married American GIs in South Korea. While the club industry surrounding American military bases is widespread in the Philippines and Japan (Höhn and Moon 2010), none of migrant hostesses I met in South Korea had worked in these camptown clubs.3 Despite the women’s lack of direct involvement, the historical legacy of women Bhospitality workers^ for international tourists and American GIs in the 1970s Philippines (Chant and McIlwaine 1995) casts a shadow over the current migrant brokerage in the Philippines for the entertainment sector. This article draws on immersed participant observation of the day-to-day interactions of the migrants and South Korean actors, including migrant advocates, religious leaders, and employers.4 Because of my fluency in English and Korean and my proficiency in Tagalog, I worked with NGO staff members and migrant workers, often as an interpreter. For example, as a volunteer at a local NGO in Factorytown, I observed and taught a Korean language class for migrant workers and assisted with labor counseling and visits to hospitals, the labor office, and the immigration office. In Basetown, I volunteered at Sisterhood Center, a feminist NGO, assisting 2

As of 2009, among the 15,412 Filipina women living in South Korea with a legal visa status, 2,931 (19 percent) had industrial laborer visas and 2,806 (15 percent) had Bentertainer^ visas used for hostess work (Ministry of Justice of South Korea 2010). 6,130 (28 percent) were married to South Korean men, and the remainder were distributed across multiple visa categories including student, business, diplomat, agricultural work, etc. 3 A small minority had previously worked as hostesses in Japan for Japanese customers prior to working in South Korean clubs. 4 As part of my larger study, I conducted semi-structured interviews with Filipina migrant women (n=36) and South Korean migrant advocates (n=24) to understand their migration to South Korea and advocacy work as part of their broader life trajectories. While the interviews inform my analysis, the data for this article is based on fieldnotes I have taken from participant observations and conversations in natural settings. I have not used computer-based qualitative analysis software for this project.

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translation at counseling sessions and visits to immigration offices. In addition, I participated in events organized by national migrant organizations, such as forums and protests. Social gatherings and religious services targeting Filipino migrants were another critical venue for my fieldwork. The presence of South Korean volunteers, activists, journalists, and researchers was common in Factorytown, and so was my presence. Only a few weeks after my arrival through an introduction of a Bangladeshi migrant worker active in migrant activism, the Filipino migrants in a tight-knit community recognized me as the Bgirl^ from the United States who spoke heavily accented Tagalog. I was warmly received as I participated in worship services, bible study meetings, and community events such as baptism ceremonies and basketball league games. Unlike in Factorytown, my presence as a South Korean woman in her late twenties in Basetown was unusual and people did not easily make sense of who I was and what I was doing there. My introduction to Basetown was through a Filipino priest affiliated with the Migrant Mission of the Catholic Church, whom I met in Factorytown. In Basetown, I attended the weekly Tagalog Catholic mass and visited clubs about twice a week to talk to Filipina hostesses and South Korean managers as they waited for customers. During the day, I visited Filipina women who left the clubs in their homes, spending time with their husbands and boyfriends, and I visited those who worked in the clubs at their group residence. Reflecting the fragile community in Basetown which I detail later, my interactions with Filipina women and South Korean employers tended to be limited to personal one-on-one relationships, rather than being part of the collective community life as I was in Factorytown. In coding the data, I focused on migrant women’s articulation of rights and membership, the various discourses used as grounds for rights claims, and how these discourses converged or conflicted within interactions between migrant women and South Korean civil society actors. From daily fieldnotes taken in a small notepad during the day, I followed the process of open and closed coding of emerging themes, with a particular attention to migrants’ work experiences, how the work was structured on a day-to-day basis, pay structures, their relationships with other migrants, their sense of mobility and power vis-à-vis their employers, and the actions they took in the case of rights violations. In addition, I analyzed how South Korean advocacy workers used different discursive repertoires—such as women’s victimhood, workers’ rights, and human rights—in their advocacy work, and systematically compared the occasions when they used these discourses.

Gender at Work in Factories and Clubs Migrant factory workers and hostesses were bound by the parameters of the segregated migrant districts where their workplaces were located—the factory complex in Factorytown and the club districts in Basetown. This section examines how the labor process in these sectors, beyond the characteristics of particular workplaces, shaped the contours of migrant community formation and had important implications for migrant women’s ability to claim rights.

Women Workers in Factorytown In Factorytown, Filipina women were part of a mixed-gender and multinational workforce from many countries across Asia and Africa. These women worked alongside men in small and medium-sized factories owned by South Koreans producing furniture, slippers, car accessories, and noodles. Within the factories, there was often a clear division of men’s and women’s work,

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even as workers from different countries worked side by side. For example, in a slipper factory, Filipino and Bangladeshi men operated the machine to produce slippers and Nepalese and Filipina women packaged them. On average, women’s monthly incomes (USD $800–1200) were lower than men’s ($1100–2000)5 both because the classification of women’s work as Blighter^ and Blow-skilled^ was used to justify a lower base salary and because men worked more overtime with extra pay. Most women worked from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. six days a week, though some worked shorter hours on Saturdays. During my fieldwork, we often cooked and ate dinner together while their husbands and boyfriends were still at work, earning overtime pay. Although women’s work was considered Bless-skilled^ than men’s, migrant women in the manufacturing sector benefitted from the structure of factory work, which valued experience and seniority as an asset. As women workers accumulated time in a factory, they developed skills that improved their status and made them potentially competitive in the labor market. These skills and resources served as a basis for long-term employment and a sense of job security, even in the absence of a legal visa. Many migrant factory workers in Factorytown were proud of their long tenure in a single factory. Roselle Reyes, a Filipina woman in her late 40s who was an undocumented factory worker, proudly declared, BI am an expert in sanding. They would not be able to find someone else like me because I’ve been doing this for 15 years.^ She pointed to her right hand where she had held the sanding tool for years and said, BLook at my hands. The bone here on my thumb has moved to over here. Don’t I deserve something for this?^ Although Roselle’s statement about her disfigurement stressed her injury and hardships from her factory work, she also used it as a basis of her deservingness. Roselle argued that the South Korean government owed her a working visa and amnesty for all the hard work she contributed at the factory. South Korean employers recognized the value of the skilled workforce and demonstrated their respect for experienced women migrant workers through continued employment and intermittent pay raises, albeit with a persistent gender pay gap. Despite the risk of fines for immigration law violations, many employers in Factorytown preferred long-term undocumented workers like Roselle because their work skills and Korean language proficiency were superior to those of legal workers who entered South Korea under the EPS, a short-term temporary migrant labor system. According to the migrant advocacy organizations working in the area, about 60 % of workers in Factorytown were undocumented. Moreover, it was common for factories that hired migrant workers for legal minimum wage under the EPS to also hire undocumented workers at a higher pay grade because of their experience, but also out of sheer necessity to meet the time-sensitive demands in the factory despite the risk of fines for fines for violating immigration law. Roselle was able to leverage her and her husband’s lengthy tenure with their employer to obtain jobs for relatives in her factory. One worker who had been helped by Roselle was Florence Ocampo, a 28-year-old Filipina woman from the same hometown. At first, Florence struggled in her job as a sander; having worked as a domestic worker in Taiwan and in the service sector in the Philippines before migrating to South Korea, she did not have the necessary skills for factory work. Roselle promised the factory owner that she would train Florence until she caught up with the speed of the line. After seven months of work, Florence told me, BNow, I have skills. You know, I 5

The amounts given hereafter are US dollars. Their earnings varied month to month, because of the unpredictable amount of overtime work. I use the estimated rate of one US dollar for 1,000 Korean won, although the exchange rate fluctuated during the time of my fieldwork during the global financial crisis, between 900 and 1300 won for one US dollar. In South Korean currency, this amount would range from approximately 800,000 to 1,200,000 won for women, and 1,100,000 to 2,000,000 won for men. This was according to the migrant factory workers who mostly kept a record of their monthly earnings in detail.

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can go anywhere to another factory and find work.^ Florence did not move because she felt comfortable working with Roselle and her other co-workers, and she was able to negotiate with her manager to receive a raise according to her skill level. Such referrals and instances of mutual help within co-ethnic networks were common in Factorytown; migrant factory workers helped family members, relatives, church members, and co-workers out of a sense of solidarity, which strengthened their sense of community across gender lines. For migrant women, the co-ethnic community offered the opportunity to mobilize not only other women’s networks and resources but also those of migrant men with whom they had close ties as wives, girlfriends, relatives, and neighbors. This community also disseminated important information, for example, knowledge about South Korean labor law. Longer-term migrants taught new migrants like Florence to keep detailed records of their overtime hours and monthly wages, in case the employer refused to pay the legal severance pay in the future. The strong co-ethnic community in Factorytown included both documented and undocumented workers and offered resources to address their particular vulnerabilities: For Blegal^ workers bound to an abusive employer, the migrant network provided referrals to new jobs, places to stay, and social support. For undocumented migrant workers vulnerable to labor abuses based on the lack of a formal contract, the community to acted collectively in negotiations with employers. Migrant women workers in Factorytown also benefitted from the male-centered camaraderie that South Korean employers had with migrant male workers, though they were not necessarily included in such bonding. Many South Korean factory owners and managers in Factorytown, who were mostly working-class men, formed affective bonds with migrant men through many hours of working together on the shop floor and male-only socializing after work. For example, Chang Byungho, a South Korean manager in his 40s, spoke at length about his Bdebt^ to migrant workers while we were having drinks and grilled pork belly after work in the makeshift stacked-container apartment where Florence and her husband lived: If we stumble here and die, it’s not like my blood and their blood is a different color. When I had my own factory, these people, Filipinos (pointing fingers to three Filipino men in the room), built it up with me. When the company was going through difficulty, they said, BIt’s okay, let’s do it together,^ and waited for two or three months without pay when other South Korean workers left me. I told the workers, we are not Koreans, Banglas, Filipinos, but we are all our company people. Byungho’s gratitude to migrant workers in his factory for their selfless hard work led him to cultivate a sense of solidarity that transcended national boundaries. It is noteworthy, however, that he did not point to any migrant women in the same room in his acknowledgement, including Roselle who worked together with her husband in the factory for the same time period. For Byungho and other South Korean employers, migrant women in the factory belonged to Bour company people^ only partially—less as full workers themselves but more as the wives, sisters, and cousins of male workers. To be sure, such sentiments of team spirit among migrant workers and their employers should not be overstated—Byungho acknowledged that he paid migrant workers less than South Koreans for the same work, because Bthat’s a lot of money in their home countries.^ There were also cases of exploitative working conditions, schemes to underpay workers, discriminatory treatment against migrants, physical and verbal abuse, and sexual harassment, which migrant workers actively challenged by bringing legal claims to the labor office and mobilizing protests. However, I also witnessed genuine bonding between South Korean factory owners and migrant factory workers, such as a middle-aged South Korean man

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sobbing and hugging migrant male workers at the detention center when they were being deported. Because many of the factories in Factorytown were small, and because the South Korean owners and managers often started out as factory workers, the boundary between migrant workers and South Korean owners was less rigid. The factory owners were highly aware that without migrant workers, their factories would not be able to sustain themselves. Migrant women workers were excluded from male-centered bonding, but they were able to benefit from these networks through relationships with migrant men who protected them from disrespect and abuse as wives, girlfriends, sisters, cousins, etc. Migrant women usually utilized their kinship networks of brothers and cousins to handle sexual harassment quietly, but on occasion, they also staged collective action with other male and female migrant workers to challenge sexual harassment. Joyce Basa was a Filipina single woman in her mid 30s known in the local Filipino community by the nickname of abogado (lawyer) because of her charismatic personality and knowledge of labor law. Joyce worked in an automotive accessory factory as an EPS worker when a Filipina co-worker approached Joyce for advice about sexual harassment. Their factory manager had invited the co-worker to his office in the late evening, made sexually suggestive comments, and tried to kiss her. Joyce and her co-workers organized a sitin and refused work until the manager finally apologized. Then, together with other Filipino community members and South Korean activists, Joyce created a brochure about sexual harassment that they distributed outside the local Catholic Church during Tagalog mass. Despite their status as migrant workers with precarious legal status, the women factory workers had resources to deal with labor rights violations: the organization of factory work that valued experience and skills and a co-ethnic community that provided a sense of collective solidarity in the company of working men, especially through intimate connections with migrant men. These resources provided Factorytown women with the ability to claim rights vis-à-vis their employers; the same was not true of migrant hostesses in Basetown clubs.

BWorking Girls^ in Basetown In Basetown, Filipina women were the overwhelming majority of hostesses working in the clubs surrounding the American military base. All the hostesses were women, at least visibly,6 and less than 10 % of hostesses were South Korean or from the former Soviet Union. Club owners and managers were both men and women, and mostly South Korean. The camptown clubs catered to American GI customers almost exclusively, though a small number of clubs opened their doors to migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia after curfew at the American military base. The clubs served GIs, selling them intimacy, fun, and in some cases, sex. Hostess services consisted of largely two categories: BJuice^ sales and Bbar fines.^ When a customer paid $10 to buy a hostess a glass of Juice—a mixed drink made of fruit juice and inexpensive hard liquor—he also purchased the woman’s company for 15–20 minutes as they chatted or played pool. Some clubs also had a system of Bbar fines,^ in which a customer paid $200–$300 to take a woman out for a whole night. Other clubs also had BVIP rooms,^ where more explicit sex-for-money exchanges took place in a private setting. The bar fine and Juice sales systems are not exclusive to South Korean camptowns but are shared transnationally across the American military sexual commerce industry in Olongapo, Philippines (Moselina 1979) and other clubs catering to American GIs in Okinawa (Sturdevant and Stoltzfus 1992). 6

Unlike in Japan, where clubs with women hostesses and transgender hostesses coexist (Parreñas 2011), there were only women hostesses in the camptown clubs in South Korea that I observed.

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Unlike the pay structure in the factories, hostesses’ income was dependent on individual performance and fluctuated from less than $500 to more than $1500 per month. Migrant hostesses received approximately $400 as monthly base pay, which was commonly withheld by the promoter who brought them to South Korea, to be paid only when they returned to the Philippines as a single lump sum payment—a practice at the heart of the Bindentured mobility^ of migrant hostesses that Rhacel Parreñas (2011) observed in Japan. The rest of their income comprised tips, commissions on Juice sales, and, for workers who participated, bar fines. Although most hostesses had a written labor contract that stipulated a minimum wage of about $850 per month for 44 hours of work and one holiday per week, no hostess I met received her minimum pay or a weekly day off. Instead, migrant hostesses commonly worked in the clubs from 5:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. during weekdays and from 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. or later on the weekend, with 1 day off per month, if at all. Many club owners also instituted quota systems under which each hostess was required to sell a certain amount, ranging from 200 to 400 Juices per month. If a hostess failed to meet her quota, she might receive a reduced commission, pay a penalty, be transferred to another club, or be sent back to the Philippines. Unlike factory work, in which workers gained security by improving their skillset over time, work experience did not necessarily provide migrant hostesses similar benefits. Although intricate skills were involved in the intimate labor of hostess work, including flirtation and emotion work that hostesses cultivated over time (Cheng 2010; Choo 2016; Parreñas 2011), other factors attracted American GI customers to the clubs, such as youth and Bfreshness.^ Many club owners preferred to hire young women rather than older, more experienced hostesses, and they frequently sent women away to other clubs to bring in Bnew girls.^ In Basetown clubs, the arrival of new hostesses was news among the American GIs, and they visited the clubs to Bcheck out^ the new women. The club manager would point out Bthis is a new girl^ and ask the GIs to buy welcome drinks. The men obliged without exception, benefitting the club. Clients’ preference for novelty set the stage for a short-term rotation among clubs, which made migrant hostesses’ lives precarious. Under the subcontracting system, in which hostesses belonged to a promoter who contracted with multiple clubs, women were rotated—both voluntarily and involuntarily—among different clubs in various camptowns in South Korea. If a woman’s performance was not considered successful after several moves, promoters would send her back to the Philippines without prior notice, regardless of her contract period. Due to this power to place and relocate hostesses, migrant hostesses had limited capacity to make demands and claim their rights vis-à-vis club owners and promoters. In addition, although a small number of runaway hostesses made their way into the manufacturing sector, most migrant hostesses lacked the knowledge and social networks in South Korea to enable such a move. The organization of work in camptown clubs put migrant hostesses under the paternalistic control of employers. Although hostesses ranged in age from late teens to mid 40s, they were often called Bgirls,^ and sometimes Bjuicy girls,^ or Bdrinkie girls,^ derogatory names referring to their Juice sales. They were expected to call their employers Bmommy^ or Bdaddy^ and were subject to personal control by employers, who punished workers for infractions. The parental nature of these relationships justified employers’ control over women’s mobility and intimate lives. Some clubs had managers escort women back and forth between their residences and the club, and when a hostess was caught leaving her house unsupervised, she was fined a large sum of money; for example, one hostess was fined $100 for going to the store to buy a phone card. This practice of restricting women’s mobility also occurred in milder forms in other clubs where migrant hostesses were Bgrounded^ during the early months of their work under club owners’ authority and surveillance.

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Like the male bonding that connected South Korean factory owners and managers to migrant male workers, South Korean female club owners and managers sometimes bonded with migrant hostesses. Whereas some club owners and managers controlled migrant hostesses through excessive and arbitrary fines, physical and verbal abuse, and threats of deportation, others were caring and formed an intimate bond with migrant hostesses. Some South Korean club owners and managers connected with migrant hostesses by drawing on their past experiences as hostesses. The sympathy felt by owners and managers did not necessarily translate into respect for them as workers. Rather, they argued that their paternalistic actions were necessary to protect Bnaïve^ hostesses. BThese girls don’t know what’s good for them,^ asserted Hwang Jinsook, a South Korean club owner who used to be a club hostess in the 1980s; Jinsook reported that she forbade migrant women in her club from going out at night by themselves, Bbecause it hurts them.^ She explained, When these girls have a boyfriend, they feel bad making him pay $200 for one night, and they think, I am going out with this guy and why is the club owner getting a 50 percent cut? And they start sneaking out at night and give themselves for free, thinking that he will marry them. Or they run away with him. But that’s stupid…Men never appreciate you if you are doing that. Instead, they take you for granted and leave. Jinsook understood her actions as looking after the women rather than as controlling them. Under such paternalistic relations, migrant hostesses were not considered as adult workers capable of making their own informed decisions but rather as working Bgirls^ who needed direction and guidance. Many hostesses disagreed with this interpretation, but they either complied with club rules or ran away instead of challenging employers because they had limited resources to do so. Unlike migrant factory workers who were embedded in a tight co-ethnic community, migrant hostesses in Basetown faced isolation. Hostess work carried a stigma based in sexual morality that some women internalized and others felt from the outside, making them hide from others. Maria Albano, a 38-year-old Filipina woman, migrated to South Korea with the belief that she would be working as a singer. She was dismayed to discover the sexual nature of her work as a Bjuicy girl.^ For Maria, selling companionship to American GIs compromised her honor: BI swallowed my pride.^ To guarantee a certain level of Juice sales and also to cope with their moral concerns about transactional intimacy, hostesses like Maria cultivated Bboyfriends^ or regular customers, with whom they developed romantic and sexual relationships that sometimes led to cohabitation and marriage (Choo 2013; see also Chant and McIlwaine 1995; Cheng 2010). During seven months of working in Basetown, although she was a devout Catholic, Maria hesitated to attend the Tagalog mass in Basetown because she could not take part in communion out of shame. Because the church was at the heart of the Filipino ethnic community in South Korea, alienation from religious activities exacerbated the isolation of migrant hostesses. Beyond sexual morality as a source of isolation, the structure of commissions and tips, along with pressure to sell Juice in the clubs, created competition for GI customers among migrant hostesses. In Basetown, most Filipina women had only a few friends who worked in the same club, and these friendships were fragile. When a GI who used to buy drinks exclusively for one hostess began courting another woman in the same club, the relationship between the two women became tense and often soured. Because many women were serious about their romantic relationships, they took it personally when another hostess flirted with their regular customers to sell Juice. For some women, this sense of fierce competition continued even after they ran away from the clubs to live with their GI boyfriends. BYou can never trust a Filipina,^ Arlene Rivera, a 35-year-old Filipina woman declared bitterly as she told a story about a woman who she had treated like a younger

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sister, but who, in her words, Bstole my fiancé,^ after Arlene ran away from the club to live with him. Her American GI fiancé married the younger woman and moved back to the US with her, leaving Arlene, a single mother of a three-year-old boy, alone and undocumented in South Korea. Although some hostesses did form strong bonds against the odds, the structure of hostess work— based on a short-term rotation and individual connections with customers rather than team work— was rarely conducive to fostering a tight co-ethnic community or worker solidarity that hostesses could rely on to claim rights as migrant workers. The gendered organization of work in these two labor market sectors partly explains why Katherine and Rachel, two Filipina migrants, experienced their rights as migrant workers in very different ways in South Korea. But another key factor in shaping the practice of rights for migrant women was the distinctive civil society mobilization in South Korea.

Civil Society Mobilization for Migrant Rights By tracing the on-the-ground struggles for migrant rights, this section highlights how the national social movement context of South Korea shapes the distinctive gendered forms of civil society mobilization for migrant factory workers and hostesses while utilizing transnational discursive resources and movement connections.

Fighting for Workers’ Rights in Factorytown Pastor Paul was legendary in Factorytown. A South Korean man in his mid 50s who had been involved in anti-poverty student activism during college, Pastor Paul led Jesus Church, a small, predominantly Filipino congregation of dedicated evangelical believers, and had devoted his life to the mission of aiding migrant workers for more than a decade. BHe is a man of action,^ said Katherine with admiration. Recounting Pastor Paul’s story, she said: See, once upon a time, Boyet didn’t get his salary for several months. And the factory owner refused to pay and said to him, BGo away. I will report you to the immigration if you bug me.^ So he went to Pastor Paul for help. And he got very upset! BHow dare the owner treat my church member like this?^ So he went to the factory and waited and waited. And finally the factory owner showed up, and they got into a huge fistfight! And he won! That’s how he got the salary. When I asked Pastor Paul about the story, he laughed and said the story is exaggerated but true. He explained why he became angry with the factory owner: BThese people worked so hard, and how could he not give them their pay? It is the fruit of their hard work!^ Pastor Paul shared the message he tells migrant workers: BYou are supporting your families with your sweat and tears, so you are honorable breadwinners who deserve blessings from God.^ Until the mid 1990s, migrant workers like Katherine and Boyet were excluded from legal protection under South Korean labor law. Even after workers became entitled to legal protection, a significant gain for migrant activism, power differentials between migrant workers and employers, language barriers, and insecurity based on their precarious legal status made them vulnerable to labor rights violations. When migrant factory workers did not receive the money they worked for, they regularly sought the assistance of co-ethnic community members and South Korean advocates like Pastor Paul to file cases at the labor office or negotiate directly with factory owners to enforce their rights.

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Faith-based South Korean advocacy groups were at the heart of community life for migrant workers in Factorytown and were highly effective in the fight to ensure that migrant workers were able to access their labor rights on the ground. In addition to Pastor Paul’s Jesus Church, there were three other Catholic and Protestant churchaffiliated migrant advocacy organizations in town. Their religious activities such as Sunday mass were attended predominantly by Filipinos, but all migrant workers— regardless of their affiliation with the church or their ethnicity—sought assistance from these advocacy organizations to resolve labor, medical, and other issues. These organizations sustained the community against the constant threat of immigration raids and created the conditions for migrants’ long-term settlement. With the support of migrant advocacy NGOs, migrant workers in Factorytown of various ethnic communities and legal statuses were able to collectively mobilize to advance migrants’ rights. Advocacy for migrant workers in South Korea as such was firmly grounded in the legacy of South Korean civil society mobilization for the dignity of workers, which included both male and female factory workers. All major industrial cities in South Korea had locally active migrant worker advocacy organizations; the overwhelming majority of these organizations were Protestant and Catholic Church-based NGOs with a legacy of labor activism in the 1970s and 80s (Kim 2011). Specifically, the minjung (common people’s) movement rose against the military authoritarian regimes and mobilized South Korean workers in the 1970s and 1980s to improve substandard working conditions and exercise labor rights, as well as to regain their dignity as workers (Kim 2003; Koo 2001). In particular, women factory workers were at the forefront of such struggles, especially in the 1970s, in their efforts to build democratic unions and to gain recognition as legitimate workers with rights, against the notion that they were temporary workers—not breadwinners—who would quit after getting married (Kim, 2001). In addition to the faith-based migrant advocacy, beginning in 2001, a more radical wing of migrant activism mobilized migrant workers, forming the Migrants’ Trade Union (MTU) in 2005. Despite political differences between the faith-based groups and trade unions, they commonly joint-hosted protests, media campaigns, and policy forums, and they also regularly organized international solidarity events by inviting migrant advocacy groups based in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines to share strategies for migrant policy reforms and for direct collective actions. A critical discursive tool deployed by migrant advocacy NGOs and trade unions was the discussion of migrants’ contributions to South Korea through their standing as workers. In November 2008, about 150 people, including activists from the Migrants’ Trade Union and migrant advocacy NGOs, migrant workers, and factory owners in Factorytown, all gathered for a candlelight vigil against the immigration crackdown. Father Won Jinheon, the director of a national migrant worker advocacy network, asserted: BThese people are not criminals. They are workers, and thanks to them, the economy in this town, and also in this country, has developed. They are not paper cups that we can use and then throw away!^ Protesters also stressed that the factory jobs occupied by migrants were undesirable to most South Korean workers and that their work was necessary for South Korea and should be recognized as such. In so doing, they were using workers’ dignity as a significant discursive resource to extend rights to migrants as deserving members of society based on the long-standing connection between work and citizenship (Gordon and Lenhardt 2008). Based on the previous struggles of South Korean women to claim dignity for women factory workers as family breadwinners, migrant women in Factorytown were able to claim and benefit from labor rights alongside male workers, as in the case of Katherine, who successfully brought a legal case against a factory owner who withheld her salary and

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severance pay. Knowledge about Korean labor law and the grievance claims process was widespread among migrant factory workers in Factorytown, to the extent that, ironically, some South Korean workers learn they have a legal claim to severance pay through migrant workers. However, labor rights for migrant workers in the manufacturing industry were configured under a model that was not attentive to women’s gender-specific claims to rights such as maternity leave and maternal health protections. As Nicole Constable (2014) demonstrates in the case of migrant women who become mothers in Hong Kong, migrant workers under temporary labor migration regimes are recognized only as workers, not as people with personal lives, desires, or motherhood. In Factorytown, when migrant women workers became pregnant, they were often fired and asked to return after the birth without any paid leave. When Liezel Villaflor, a Filipina woman in her early 40s, entered her seventh month of pregnancy, she quit the factory as the managers expected her to. She gave a birth to a son whom she sent to the Philippines a few months later to be raised by her mother. Pregnancy and childbirth took time away from work and caused a change of workplace, but she handled these costs as a personal matter rather than a collective issue of labor rights. For many documented migrant workers who were bound by contract to a particular factory, pregnancy caused them to become undocumented when their factories refused to renew their contracts and they could not find another factory job within the two-month search period. South Korean labor law stipulated 90 days of paid maternity leave, and documented migrant workers were eligible for this benefit, but I did not observe the practice of this legal provision or any efforts on the part of migrant advocacy groups to mobilize for this maternityrelated labor rights. Such maternity provisions were difficult for South Korean women workers to obtain in practice as well, and feminist organizations and women’s unions in South Korea continued to advocate for their enforcement. These organizations challenged male dominance in the labor movement by putting women’s issues such as maternity leave, sexual harassment, and employment discrimination on the agenda of labor activism (Chun 2009), but their efforts had not yet been extended to include migrant women workers. The discrepancy between advocacy for the issues common to both men and women and those particular to women workers was also evident in the case of workers’ compensation. For most workplace injuries, South Korean migrant advocacy groups were very effective in fighting to extend benefits to undocumented workers and in ensuring that both documented and undocumented workers could claim their rightful compensation. When a machine operator cut his fingers or a furniture assemblyman hurt his lower back, local migrant advocates helped them file paperwork to receive benefits and sometimes fought with factory owners who asserted that the injuries were not work-related. When women factory workers suffered similar injuries, they received similar attention from migrant advocacy groups. However, when a woman worker had a miscarriage, advocacy groups treated this as an individual misfortune rather than an issue of workplace safety, though migrant women workers made an explicit connection between miscarriages and workplace conditions. BIt’s that damn plastic,^ said Roselle, BEveryone knows that’s the problem. Why would so many women in the slipper factory lose their babies like that?^ However, issues of maternal rights and women’s health were not part of the labor rights discourse among migrant advocacy groups in South Korea. Mobilization based on worker’s rights and dignity provided both men and women migrant workers with expanded rights, but workers’ rights were not conceptualized in a way that included women’s gender-specific demands, limiting the practice of rights for migrant women in the manufacturing sector.

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Protecting Women-As-Victims in Basetown BThings just don’t change here in the camptowns. The same things that happened with South Korean women 20 years ago are now happening with Filipina women—violence, prostitution, abandonment. But our country [South Korea] still does not view these foreign women as victims of human trafficking,^ sighed Director Chun Aeran, a director of Sisterhood Center. Sisterhood Center had been working with women in the camptown clubs for more than two decades and was one of the key South Korean feminist NGOs that successfully achieved anti-prostitution legal reforms in 2004, including the Protection of Victims of Sexual Trafficking Act. As part of this reform, Sisterhood Center was able to receive government funding to assist women in the camptown clubs as Bvictims of sexual trafficking.^ Despite these policy changes and financial support for her work, Director Chun still expressed a sense of isolation and frustration: BWe are the only organization that helps these foreign women. We are doing this work now, but if we dissolve, there would be no one these women could rely on. The Labor Office, the Immigration Office, the Ministry of Gender Equality, the Police, they all don’t care about these women.^ Indeed, Sisterhood Center was one of very few South Korean organizations that advocated on behalf of migrant hostesses or offered them assistance. Being Bthe only^ such organization took a toll on the three social workers at Sisterhood Center, who had to balance multiple tasks and case files and travel to camptowns near and far. Despite the Center’s outreach efforts, only a few migrant hostesses were aware of their work; but, even with such limited publicity, the staff members’ hands were more than full. On any given day, a social worker might help an elderly South Korean former camptown hostess fill out an application for social welfare benefits, then help a Filipina hostess who ran away from the club retrieve her passport from the promoter, and perhaps end the day by helping a Russian hostess file for divorce from the American GI husband who abandoned her. In most cases, migrant hostesses contacted Sisterhood Center for assistance after they ran away from the club, but in rare cases, the Center intervened to help a migrant woman who called for help from the club where she was confined or offered medical or legal assistance to women still working in the clubs. Whereas rights claims for migrant factory workers were modeled on migrant workers as contributors to South Korea, claims made by feminist organizations for hostesses focused on migrant hostesses as women victims in need of protection who were deceived into prostitution. A 2007 report by the Center stated: Among the foreign women who enter South Korea, including those who enter with an E-6 [entertainer] visa and end up working as prostitutes, no one has voluntarily entered the country for the purpose of prostitution. Thus, we must recognize that the prostitution of foreign women, particularly those with E-6 visas, is due to the brokering of the South Korean agency and the camptown club owner, and in these cases, foreign women need to be protected as victims. During my fieldwork, Sisterhood Center and other organizations for camptown hostesses were active leaders in coalition work with mainstream feminist groups in anti-prostitution campaigns. As exemplified by the statement, Bno one has voluntarily entered the country for the purpose of prostitution,^ it is clear that the Center approached the camptown club industry not as legitimate workplaces needing labor rights advocacy. U.S.-led international anti-trafficking directives influenced anti-prostitution law and policy reforms in South Korea to redefine women engaged in sexual commerce—who were previously considered criminals—as Bvictims of prostitution^ and to include protections for

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trafficking victims (Cheng 2011).7 Yet the discourse of women’s victimhood, far from being an American imposition, was also firmly grounded in the South Korean feminist movement’s approach to the issue of prostitution, which was rooted in the historical legacy of Bcomfort women,^ or the forced military prostitution of South Korean women under Japanese colonial occupation (Moon 1999), and thus was culturally resonant in the national context. Advocacy on behalf of Bcomfort women^ and South Korean camptown hostesses to American GIs both began with a basis in Christian social justice, feminism, and anti-militarism. Although these two forms of advocacy diverged in the 1990s (Moon 1999), in the early 2000s, they converged again under the global discourse of Bvictims of sex trafficking.^ Sisterhood Center and other feminist groups in South Korea were active in transnational organizing against trafficking, forming a coalition with anti-militarism and feminist groups in Asia-Pacific region, including the Philippines where the discourse of violence against women and victimhood with respect to prostitution is also central (Roces 2009). At the time of my fieldwork, there was a nascent movement of sex worker activism at the margins in South Korea (Kim 2013), but it had not extended to mobilization efforts for migrant hostesses. Sisterhood Center advocated for protective measures for migrant hostesses, including legal and medical support and shelter services. While they certainly took an antiprostitution position and employed a transnational discourse of victimhood, support from the Center was not limited to self-identified victims, and they did not require the women to leave the clubs in order to receive assistance. Yet instead of framing the services they offered as the collective rights of migrant hostesses, they were offered under a casework model of social work to individual women who demonstrated need. For example, when Ela Navarro, a Filipina hostess in Basetown, had an appendix rupture that required immediate surgery, her co-worker Arlene called Sisterhood Center to take her to the hospital and cover the medical expenses. Ela was immensely grateful for this help because the cost of the surgery was unaffordable to her. Ela, and many others like her, was entitled to health insurance benefits under her labor contract, but she never received these benefits in practice. Despite the prevalence of this problem, Sisterhood Center addressed medical needs on a case-by-case basis and did not demand the enforcement of migrant hostesses’ contracts. Given Sisterhood Center’s excessive workload, it was difficult to imagine that they could take on such a task, even if they had tried to do so. Making demands for rights would require a high level of collective mobilization on the part of migrant hostesses, which was weakened by the organization of work in the club industry. In addition, organizations like Sisterhood Center received little support from other sectors of South Korean civil society, such as the faith-based migrant advocacy NGOs and trade unions that were at the forefront of migrant workers’ advocacy. The actions of Father Thomas, a Catholic priest deployed by the overseas mission of the Philippines and migrant advocate, exemplified the difference between advocacy work for migrant factory workers and hostesses. In Factorytown, Father Thomas was actively involved with Filipino community mobilization through social activities and labor counseling, spending countless hours organizing bowling leagues and accompanying migrant workers to the Labor Office. In contrast, in Basetown, he only offered a weekly mass and had not planned any other efforts to mobilize the migrant hostesses. When I asked whether he intended to start programs like those in Factorytown, 7

The Trafficking in Persons Report issued by the US Department of State in 2001, which ranked Korea as a Tier 3 country that failed to make efforts to prohibit trafficking, provided the discursive devices for South Korean feminist organizations to reform the anti-prostitution law.

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Father Thomas said no, explaining, BNobody will come. They are busy sleeping and meeting their boyfriends, and some can’t go out because their clubs don’t let them.^ He also differentiated hostess work from factory work: Some [migrant hostesses] run away and work in the factories, but many stay because they know factory work is difficult…They have to carry heavy stuff, risk having their fingers cut, and they have to dress like ajumma [middle-aged women]. At clubs, it’s easy work, you dress sexy, and drink, sing, dance, and you can sleep the whole day the next day. For Father Thomas, hostess workers were not real workers like factory workers; Breal work,^ he implied, was characterized by physical demand, risk of injury, and de-sexualization. He perceived hostess work as Beasy work,^ eliding the long working hours and high degree of physical and emotional labor involved in hostess work. It was noteworthy that Father Thomas, a Catholic priest, described hostess work as Beasy work^ rather than as morally questionable work from the perspective of the Church. This understanding affected his willingness to participate in advocacy on behalf of hostesses. Other South Korean migrant advocates were less explicit; when asked about migrant hostesses, many migrant advocates said they did not know much about hostesses, but they thought that these workers’ needs were a better match for feminist organizations than for their own. While stigma related to sexual morality might have influenced Father Thomas’s and others’ hesitation to advocate for migrant hostesses, it was hostesses’ exclusion from dignity of workers that limited advocacy on their behalf, leaving Sisterhood Center isolated in its efforts. Unlike migrant factory workers, migrant hostesses did not fit the model of workers who could make legitimate demands for labor rights with the support of South Korean civil society. Yet most of the migrant hostesses I met thought of themselves primarily as workers and as Bbreadwinners.^ Unlike migrant factory workers in Factorytown, migrant hostesses in Basetown did not have Pastor Pauls who would engage in a fistfight to claim the Bfruits of their hard work,^ nor a co-ethnic community to offer mutual support. Instead, migrant hostesses in the camptown clubs only had access to the language of victimhood and social provisions for their protection while the precariousness of the rotation system made their mobilization even more challenging. The services offered by Sisterhood Center were indispensable to migrant hostesses, especially to those who wished to leave the clubs. However, for migrant hostesses who wanted to stay and work, there was great need for labor rights, protection that was unlikely to materialize as long as they were narrowly framed as vulnerable women-as-victims.

Beyond the Shadow of Working Men At the beginning of this article, I offered the story of Katherine, a migrant factory worker who had the ability to claim labor rights when migrant hostess Rachel did not, and asked how we can understand this divergence in the practice of rights for migrant factory workers and hostesses despite their shared conditions as temporary labor migrants in South Korea. Integrating the scholarship on global labor and transnational migration, this article examined the institutions of the labor market and civil society mobilization as intersecting mechanisms for the production of differentiated rights for migrants within the global regime of temporary labor migration. Delving into the process of producing gendered rights, I showed that Filipina migrant women experienced distinct workplace organization in the factories and hostess clubs, despite their common experiences of restricted rights and citizenship under South Korean immigration law. Women factory workers like Katherine shared a skill-based wage structure with Filipino men in

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the co-ethnic community, and their relationships with these men provided access to respect and resources as workers. Conversely, migrant hostesses like Rachel faced precarious working conditions under the paternalistic control of employers and in competition with other hostesses. By considering gendered morality as central to migration scholarship, this study highlights the gendered symbolic politics at the national level that shape mobilization for migrant rights in relation to social movement legacies in the host nation-state and their distinctive transnational linkages. On the shoulders of strong labor activism and the minjung movement in South Korea, the discourse of the worker-citizen was highly effective in expanding migrant rights. However, not all sectors of work offer moral standing that can serve as grounds for rights claims, and gender is salient in determining who is deemed worthy of the dignity of workers. This comparative approach makes visible the involvement of certain civil society actors and the absence of others in the lives of migrant women. For migrant factory workers, South Korean civil society mobilized on their behalf to expand their labor rights without attention to their gender-specific needs as women. For migrant hostesses, although feminist NGOs advocated for more protective measures for victims of trafficking and utilized transnational discourse and networks for anti-sex trafficking, without the involvement of other migrant advocacy groups, this effort rendered the women invisible as workers who might want to keep and improve their jobs and missing as the subjects of rights claims in South Korea. The insights from this study can be extended to examine migrant rights in other labor market sectors and national contexts beyond South Korea that involve gendered labor processes and symbolic politics. Although the manufacturing sector may be more conducive for mobilizing for labor rights in terms of the organization of work, such mobilization may not translate into rights claims in a nation-state that does not recognize citizen workers or that lacks the historical legacy that enable civil society actors to mobilize. For example, other nation-states may consider women factory workers not as citizen-workers but as temporary and cheap labor. Conversely, in the cases of domestic and agricultural work, the respective isolating and mobile labor processes in each sector pose unique challenges to the formation of migrant community, and yet, the social movement legacy and its gendered symbolic politics may differently shape the degree to which migrant domestic workers and agricultural workers would be recognized as workers accorded with labor rights, women with reproductive rights, and migrants with the right to settlement. This study challenges scholars and activists involved in migrant rights struggles to critically interrogate the gendered assumptions of work and citizenship and to strive for coalitionbuilding in efforts to help the increasing number of women who enter global circuits of migrant work to emerge from under the shadow of working men. Such endeavors must be grounded in an understanding of the continuing significance of the shadow of working men— that is, that the organization of work and civil mobilization are based on the model of masculine worker-citizens. For migrant women in factory and hostess work, their distinct positions in relation to working men—both in the labor process and in symbolic politics— mattered greatly for their ability to exercise rights. It was not their universal personhood in an abstract sense that granted them rights, but rather their ability to present themselves as gendered moral subjects deserving of rights and recognition. This moral subjectivity was constructed within labor markets and through social movement legacies based on the dignity of working men, which either excluded or partially included migrant women. The gendered processes of making rights reveal that rights are not merely bestowed upon individual subjects by states or the global community in a top-down manner; rather, rights are achieved through everyday interactions embedded in a moral community, highlighting the importance of gendered morality in conjunction with rights and citizenship under globalization.

Qual Sociol Acknowledgments I thank the special issue editors Rachel Rinaldo and Manisha Desai, the editor David Smilde and four anonymous reviewers of Qualitative Sociology, as well as Nancy Abelmann, Jennifer Carlson, Cynthia Cranford, Jennifer Chun, Jessica Cobb, Nicole Constable, Myra Marx Ferree, Phil Goodman, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Pei-Chia Lan, and Ching Kwan Lee, who offered valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. I also thank all of the participants in this study who kindly included me as part of their daily lives. This project received financial support from the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant in Sociology.

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