Forging feminism within labor unions and the legacy of democracy movements in South Korea

Abstract

Although most scholarship stresses that ‘male regular worker-centeredness’ is a trait of mainstream Korean labor unions, the specific reasons why feminism has failed to spread within Korean unionism have not been clarified. In order to answer this question, this article focuses on the entangled interrelations of feminism with broader social movements, maintaining that the historical legacy of the victory of the 1987 Great Worker Struggle – led by male workers from the heavy and chemical industries – is still a powerful factor in discouraging the spread of feminism, even though a fundamental transformation in the nature of Korean labor unions from being primarily class conscious to economistic has taken place. This article also highlights that Korean women’s movements have raised little criticism against the gender-blindness of labor unionism largely because Korean labor unions have been positioned as a ‘moral force’ in bringing about democratization. Furthermore, I stress that conflict between old feminists (socialist feminism) and young feminists (radical feminism), who tend to reflect on the dichotomous relations between gender and/or class, has actually been counterproductive to the proliferation of feminism within Korean labor unions.

Keywords:

• Labor union
• gender
• feminism
• social movement
• South Korea

Acknowledgements

I thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers their constructive and insightful comments. I thank also the social movement activists who shared their experiences. I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Steven Ivings for his valuable comments.

Notes

1. KWWA was organized in 1987 in order to focus on women’s issues within the labor movements in general. KWTU which was established in 1999 mainly aims for the unionization of working women who are either not organized because they work in small-sized companies of under 10 employees, or those who work under conditions which make it difficult to organize because of their precarious status as non-regular workers.

2. It is estimated that 1.3 million people were involved in this struggle, which is equivalent to one-third of the regular employees in enterprises with 10 or more workers.

3. Regarding the emergence and features of the ‘young feminists’ in Korea, refer to Lee (2003) and Chung (2015).

4. The proportion of women in paid work in Korea has been steady at around 40%, with the female labor market participation rate rising to 51.8% in 2015 (Statistics Korea, http://kostat.go.kr).

5. Trade union membership among women workers decreased steadily from 17% in 1980 to 7.7% in 2013 (16.4% for regular workers and 1.2% for irregular workers). Trade union membership for male workers also decreased from 19.8% in 1989 to 15.3% in 2013 (22.7% for regular workers and 3% for irregular workers) (Statistics Korea, http://kostat.go.kr).

6. S. Seo majored in social welfare at University in the 1970s, after which she decided to work for the ‘weak’, becoming a social movement activist for small farmers and workers.

7. Y. Um has been working as a women’s movement activist since the 1960s when she returned from a period of study in Germany. After her return she started to work in a labor union organization as an activist at first. Later in 1977, she established an organization for low-wage female workers and small-scale farmers having realized the male-centeredness of the labor union.

8. ‘hyŏnjang’ literally means ‘on-site’ and ‘non’ means ‘theory’. Therefore, ‘hyŏnjangnon’ refers to a theory shared by many intellectuals in the 1970s–1980s, that intellectuals themselves should become factory workers or peasants in order to directly experience the lives of the working class on the site of their productive activity. The theory stressed the need to understand the reality of working-class lives as an end in itself, and as a means to generate active participation in their movements from the bottom-up.

9. Minjung is a special concept used to describe the leading groups, including lower working class, in the Korean democracy movements. Korean women’s movements in the 1980s are known as minjung feminism which prioritized democratization and class liberation rather than women’s liberation. Regarding minjung feminism, refer to Louie (1995).

10. See Kwon (2011) on the debates of intersectionality of class and gender in Korea.