Sustainable Solidarity: Navigating Network and Bureaucracy to Resist Precarity

The transition to electric vehicles is reshaping labor markets as production expands within supplier networks. This transformation has deepened inequalities between core workers, protected by stable employment and collective agreements, and peripheral workers facing growing precarity. This study examines the Module-Suppliers Alliance (MSA) in South Korea’s automobile sector, where subcontracted workers adopted a network-based strategy to improve wages and employment security. The findings show that while network-based organizing enabled rapid mobilization and broad participation during the organizing phase, it proved less effective during bargaining as divergent interests and coordination challenges emerged. Tracing the MSA’s evolving collaboration with the Korean Metal Workers’ Union (KMWU), the study demonstrates how workers alternate between network-based organizing and bureaucratic (hierarchical) coordination across successive phases of struggle, with such coordination introduced during bargaining to complement network-based forms of organization. The author argues that this process of bureaucratic layering can sustain worker solidarity under conditions of precarity.