We are living in this country as working women: Most of us are temporally-hired workers, part-timers, dispatched workers, intern-employees, underpaid and low-skilled workers at small businesses with sless than five employees or the jobless.
From the moment of knocking the door of job markets to retirement, we continuously face frequent and various discriminations just for one reason; we were born as women in this male-dominated nation. Inhumane treatments, sexual violence and low-skilled jobs are what we routinely have to go through at the workplace. For all, we never gave up our dreams of leading a life as a humans.
However neo-liberalism, making women workers its first victims with its barbarous market-first logic, is shattering our long-cherished dreams, leading a life as a human with vested equal rights. Overall conditions of women workers are worsening rapidly: Sexual violence at the workplace and family violence such as wife-beating are soaring in this nation. More and more women are being forced to leave their job simply because they are married. More and more women workers are facing with embarrassing situation, at the workplace, such as serving beverage for male workers and doing chores. Women workers' hope for achieving protection of maternity and fully-socialized child-care system seems dying away.
Against such backgrounds, we, women workers, finally stood up to fight for equal rights at the workplace. We firmly believe that the women's labor union SWTU will play a pivotal role in enhancing women workers' rights.
Korean women have fallen major victims to the economic crisis of this country, which started November 1997. Though increasing number of women workers have been laid off or forced to move down from full-time employees to temporary employees since the economic turmoil hit the nation, existing male-dominated labor unions have turn a deaf ear to such sufferings of women workers. We believe that patriarchy, prevalent in existing Korean labor unions, is a major stumbling block to empowerment of women workers.
As long as all women (including temporary employees, part-timers, dispatched workers and contract-based employees) can't enjoy their vested rights as humans and workers, fighting for solidarity of workers is just another hypocrisy! Liberation of people and liberation of workers are not possible without liberation of women!
Now we rose courageously to fight for basic human rights of women workers. We rose for living as a human, not assistants to men workers. We rose to rediscover important roles and pride of women workers, which were ignored in the past. We rose to fight for job security for women workers and human rights of all women.
We will fight against any barbarous discriminating practices against women at the workplace, wage differences based on gender and inhumane treatments. We will fight against patriarchy at the workplace and any division of labor based on gender.
Jan. 10, 1999, we declare that Seoul Women's Trade Union is officially born. SWTU will remain as the vanguard of women's labor movements, as long as we, women workers, have courage to say "No" to any violation on our rights and fight for abolishment of all discriminating practice at the workplace. (January 10, 1999 Seoul Women's Trade Union)