Further Background to Korea's Militant Labor Unions

To add on to an earlier entry explaining the background to Korea's militant unions, the various conditions that had repressed such unions in the early days of the country's industrialization drive should also be pointed out.

These include the high level of unemployment and underemployment in post-war Korea, which in turn meant that workers had little bargaining power, as well as the government's severe repression of unions due to somewhat justified fears of communist infiltration.

According to Hagen Koo in his article The State, Minjung, and the Working Class in South Korea (Hagen Koo ed. State and Society in Contemporary Korea, Cornell University, 1993), labor protests in the 1960s were mainly due to massive layoffs, wage freezes, and delayed payments.

But it was not until 1970 when a shocking event galvanized the Korean labor movement.

On November 13, 1970, a young worker named Chun Tai Il immolated himself in a desperate attempt to publicize the inhumane conditions in garment factories. He was a tailor working in a small garment factory at the Pyungwha Market in the eastern section of Seoul, where many small garment shops were located.

"These garment shops were the archetypal sweatshops of the kind portrayed in Charles Dickens' novels. The majority of workers in this area were teenage women from the countryside; they worked thirteen to fifteen hours a day with only two days off per month. Physical conditions were extremely bleak, with little ventilation, no sunshine in the daylight hours, and little space to move around or even to stand upright because the ceilings were too low. Most of these young workers suffered from chronic stomach problems and other job-related illnesses."

Even though Chun wrote many letters to relevant departments, no one responded to his pleas. He eventually set himself on fire, while shouting "We are not machines!", "Let us rest on Sundays!", and "Abide by the labor standard laws!" Chun died in the hospital emergency room where his last words were reportedly "please do not waste my life."

And indeed, his life was not wasted. His self-immolation became a powerful symbol for the working class movement. His death was also a dramatic prelude that factory workers had become a potentially powerful political force in a rapidly industrializing society.

As Koo noted, Chun's heroic act "portended the arrival of a new era in the Korean labor movement." It was also a wake-up call for intellectuals, students and church leaders in realizing where society's most serious problems laid, and how strategic the labor movement could be for their democratization struggle.

"Student-labor linkages began to develop during this period, as did the labor involvement of activist church groups. Thus economics and politics became closely entwined to shape the character of the working-class activism to come."

Students also played an important role in raising workers' collective consciousness during the 1970s. Especially important were the night schools they set up near factory towns. These schools were initial responses to workers' perceived aspirations for further education. But overtime, the emphasis of such schools shifted to a platform where workers could "articulate their daily work experiences using a new political language", and where they could develop close links with the intellectual communities that were involved in the democratization movement.

Towards the end of the 1970s, in light of the second oil crisis, world recession, as well as Korea's runaway inflation and adverse balance of payments, another landmark incident occured.

In August 1979, several hundred female workers who were employed at a wig factory known as the YH Company staged a demonstration against the plant's closure. Predictably, police and hired thugs used violence to break up the demonstrations. Driven out of their factory, the protesters then took over the headquarters of the opposition political party.

"Thus party politics became accidentally involved in labor activism. The government reacted with repression, which in turn triggered nationwide protests against the Park regime. As the political crisis escalated, the ruling group became split internally, which eventually resulted in the assassination of President Park by his own chief of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency."

Incidentally, the word minjung (people or the masses) emerged as a powerful term for political struggle and social movement. Minjung implies a broad alliance of "alienated classes", people alienated from power and from the distribution of the fruits of economic growth. The term also conveys a strong nationalistic desire for economic and political independence.

In the early 1980s, after the Kwangju massacre, minjung became firmly established as the dominant anti-hegemonic ideology. It is a broad ideology, touching on economic, political and social realities in society. Economically, it rejects dependent capitalist development and advocates a radical restructuring of the economy in order to achieve distributive justice; politically, it elevates national unification to the position of ultimate goal, and to this end it seeks to repel the anti-communist security ideology and to end U.S. intervention in Korean affairs; socially and culturally, it promotes concepts of national identity and independence. And as a political strategy, minjung activists seek to forge a close alliance among students, industrial workers, and small farmers.