A Turning Point in the Korean Women Workers' Movement


Yang-hee Cheong (President of SWTU)

South Korea has been known to the outside world as having a lot of fragmentary, but complex and often contradictory characteristics: rapid capitalist economic growth, repeated military dictatorships for about three decades until late 1980s, never-lessening military tension with North Korea, strong student activism, and, more recently, the severe exchange crisis which has been shaking the entire life of the great majority of its citizens. Among others, however, the militant labor movement, especially since mid-1980s, has attracted a great deal of attention from labor activists and other radical social movement groups international-wide. Workers in the auto, metal, chemical, electric and electronics, and financial industries started being organized into unions in a rapid speed, and have launched harsh struggles for better working conditions, union rights, and overall social democracy.
However, as the mainstream trade union movements have been more formalized, and more centered on male-dominated industries and businesses, women workers and women-specific labor issues have been becoming more and more invisible from the policy-making processes and the key labor agendas, despite the fact that women have formed the building block not only of the Korean economic development, but also of the development of the Korean labor movement. There are few women union presidents and executives even in the businesses where women form the majority of the employees. About seventy-two percent of women waged workers work in the petty factories or offices where the number of total workforce is less than five, that is, where any protection from the existing labor-related laws are not guaranteed at all. Over seventy percent of women workers are underemployed, working as temporary, part-time, contract, or contingent employees. A lot of women also work as home-based workers who are not even officially counted as 'workers.' Sexual harassment, marriage or pregnancy bar, and other women-derogatory workplace practices are still used as main means of patriarchal labor control over women workers by both managers and male co-workers. In fact, all these women workers' unfavorable situations have been worsening with the economic restructuring projects going on since early 1990s and being more precipitated since the exchange crisis in 1998. And this also has much to do with the existing male-dominated trade unionism whose priorities are put for male workers as heads of households and major breadwinners. Overtly or covertly, women workers are regarded by male workers and union leaders as the second-layer workers, and therefore expendable when the so-called national economy as well as individual businesses are tight in budget, and when male workers and labor leaders feel there are needs for some 'compromises.'
Seoul Women's Trade Union, the first women-only trade union in the history of the Korean labor movement, was born in January 1999 with a sharp awareness on these contexts. It is a locally (Seoul) based union independent from any existing trade union federations. We, the members of SWTU, share with each other the ideas that the growing national and international neo-liberal economic regime threatens the life of women as workers in more severe ways than it does to their male counterparts, that gender inequality in the working place as well as at home eventually results in easing the capital to exploit the overall working class including both women and men because inequality within workers provides the capital with cheaper labor of discriminated groups of people and weak solidarity power of workers, and that the existing male-centered labor organizations in South Korea have so far proved themselves as unreliable for women workers to work with for their struggles for equality, justice, and anti-exploitation.
The most important goal of SWTU is to make women's labor visible and their voices heard through women workers' organizing and educating themselves, and fighting for each other as women and as comrades. SWTU is currently focusing especially on organizing underemployed women whose labor rights are refused by the laws and practices, and whose rights to union are also refused by the majority of the existing trade unions. SWTU is also making efforts to organize 'unemployed' women whose number has been rapidly increasing since the recent economic crisis (extending the membership to the 'unemployed' workers is the only formal reason that the city government of Seoul has refused to recognize SWTU as a legal union. But, we, SWTU, are convinced that the strict distinction between employed and unemployed is nothing but a non-sense especially in understanding women's working life, and that we should rather remain a non-registered union). The SWTU's year-round weekend school of women workers has been the key education activity which provides both members and non-members with chances to share, learn and teach broad range of knowledge on issues and their own experiences, all based on working class women's perspectives, and by so doing, to devise strategies to empower themselves.
It has been only less than a half year since SWTU was constructed. It has received every kind of response from every kind of social and labor activist groups and individual activists, both women and men. Some are enthusiastic while others are skeptical. Some give us encouragement while others give us warnings of dangers of independence. We get delighted at the enthusiasm and encouragement. We get even more resolute when facing skepticism and warnings. And, more than anything else, we will never forget the fact that the warmest welcoming responses have come from many of women workers themselves in Korea and even in other Asian countries.