Public transit insolvency and beliefs about the public utility of labor, New York City and Seoul 1974-2022

Youbin Kang, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Sociologists of public finance have shown that market exchanges in the public sector depend on, and reproduce pre-existing inequalities, but less attention has been paid to why certain public utilities continue to flourish, despite their nonconformity to a strict market logic. Through a comparative historical analysis in New York City and Seoul between 1974 and 2022, I examine how the two cities’ public transit authorities managed justifications around debt and service. Transit insolvency starts to emerge in the two cities as a major problem in the 2000s. In both cities, justification strategies over the moral dimensions of transit work, the largest operational cost of transit, take hold. In New York, this is done through the legacy of the civil rights movement, establishing the deservingness of upwardly mobile jobs in the city. Its success is reflected in the way that the MTA uses the tools of financialization to maintain public transit operations. In Seoul, there is discord between the state and workers over the contributions of transit labor, as vanguards as imagined by workers, a legacy of the late 1980s, versus diligent citizens as imagined by the government. The mismatch happens under a context of the Asian Financial Crisis, which introduce constraints of a dependent national currency, which prompts public transit operations to be maintained through automation, privatization, and subcontracting to cut labor costs.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 5. The Politics of Urban Exclusion