Revisiting labor mobility in industrial relations: the case of the Korean game industry

This research examines workers’ mobility experience in the Korean game industry and its implications for labor organizing efforts. To do this, it brings labor process theory to analyze the 18 in-depth interviews with Korean game developers. The findings are twofold. First, they show that the technological and socio-political changes shifted work controls, shaping the mobility pattern of game developers. These changes in industrial structure reversed the previous power relationship among game workers and increased the mobility of workers. By managing game developers in multiple subsidiaries within the value chain, game publishers transferred market risk to game developers and maintained high labor mobility. Yet, the high mobility of game workers was not exclusively employer-driven but rather came from the continuous interactions between employees and employers. The second findings show that game developers leverage their mobility power to bargain for their work effort in the labor process, but the ability to bargain varied across gender, occupation, and seniority in the workforce. Unlike the previous literature depicting high labor mobility as a barrier to organizing labor, the findings imply that industries valuing labor mobility may require different forms of labor organizing efforts. This research contributes to industrial relations by incorporating insights from labor process theory to understand labor mobility as a critical departure to understanding organizing labor in the game industry.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference