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From Hard History to Soft History: Cultural Histories of the Korean Working Class

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From Hard History to Soft History: Cultural Histories of the Korean Working Class From Hard History to Soft History: Cultural Histories of the Korean Working Class Jie-Hyun Lim Hanyang University Korean democratic trade unionism entered the international spotlight for its militancy and massive upsurge in the 1990s, while labor movements in advanced countries had been on the ebb. When the lifelong work of “heavy modernity” was replaced by the labor flexibility of “light modernity,” workers’ solidarity gave way to individual workers’ solitude. This explains why the trade union movement is more powerful in developing countries such as Korea, Brazil, and South Africa, where Fordism prevails. It is a paradox indeed that Fordism, with its massive production system, was a fertile soil for labor as well as capital. The trade union movement in Korea, however, is in flux at the turn of the third millenium. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) program, with its stress on labor flexibility, encroaches on the organizational basis of the labor movement. The progressive moments of the democratic union movement led by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) have become shakier and shakier. Their protesting vigor against the authoritarian “developmental dicta- torship” and the Korean conglomerate “Chaebul” seems to have evaporated into the past. The KCTU has shattered into the antagonistic pieces of a seg- mented labor market. The workers’ firm solidarity, once the KCTU’s pride, seems to have been cracked by discriminating sexual politics, the non-class an- tagonism between regular and contingent workers, and so on. In fact, the Kore- an democratic labor movement is at the moment not as progressive as it may ap- pear to outsiders. Korean labor is in urgent need of new strategies. It remains a serious task for Korean labor historians to explain why the Ko- rean labor movement is faltering on the threshold of the new millenium. Is the recent regress of the KCTU due only to the labor flexibility program prescribed by the IMF? Would that imply that Korean society has shifted from “heavy modernity” to “light modernity”? If so, is it an inevitable phenomenon that la- bor movements in advanced countries will face? Is it too early to decide? What, then, are the factors that make the Korean democratic labor movement hesi- tate? Can conventional leftist labor history spot these factors? Is it too late for Korean labor historians to listen carefully to E. P. Thompson’s warning against the so-called “Pilgrim’s Progress” orthodoxy to appropriate the majority of working people for the socialist cause? Are we supposed to stick to the class- centered paradigm? Initiated by the Changing Labor Relations in Asia (CLARA) program, the “Cultural Histories of the Korean Working Class” workshop held at Hanyang University, Seoul on June 1 and 2, 2001, intended to shed fresh light on the Ko- International Labor and Working-Class History No. 61, Spring 2002, pp. 169–172 © 2002 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 170 ILWCH, 61, Spring 2002 rean labor movement, not by answering, but by posing these questions in depth. Korean labor historiography has been very much inclined to “hard history” with its stress on official programs of labor platforms, conflicting political lines of leading factions, diametric constellation between pro-government and anti- government organizations and so on. Although these are crucial points that de- serve to be explored, this narrow emphasis resulted in an abstract labor history without the “soft history” of the real working masses. Very often it justified the appropriation of the working masses’ “bread and butter” demands for the ab- stract cause of the proletariat. And it leaves unexplored the subject: the micro- graphic history of the ordinary workers’ everyday life and their way of produc- ing, exchanging, and practicing the meaning of life. With the exception of Marcel van der Linden’s (International Institute of So- cial History) overview of the European labor historiography and Ratna Saptari’s (International Institute for Asian Studies) report of the CLARA project, the workshop laid a stress on Altagsgeschichte of the Korean working masses. Moo- yong Kim (Korea University) examined the complex relationship between na- tionalism, socialism and labor. The national liberation movement, in its struggle against Japanese colonialism, forged a broad-based alliance that included work- ers and peasants. Alongside class identity, national identity was a key component in forming labor identity in colonial Korea; many a worker participated volun- tarily in nationalist-led anti-Japanese demonstrations. After the liberation of the Korean peninsula in 1945, the national identity deeply rooted in workers’ con- sciousness made the working-class subordinate to the will of the independent na- tion-state. It is no wonder that workers’ strong patriotism became an ideological tool for the power elite of the nascent Korean nation-state to mobilize and ap- propriate the working class for its own purpose. Korean workers’ patriotism, nur- tured in the colonial era, thus disarmed the labor movement in the face of the na- tionalist discourse of the power elite in both Koreas. It seems that today’s KCTU’s class militancy is vulnerable to the nationalist propaganda of state power. Jun Kim (National Assembly Library) analyzed life stories of “model wom- en workers” in 1970’s. These stories show vividly how young female workers, re- cruited from poor peasant families, adapted themselves to the factory regime, and how they accepted ideologies and norms imposed by the developmental dic- tatorship and capital. Most of stories written by model workers describe man- agers in the image of a good father or mother. This meant that the paternalistic formula, “do your job as your own matter, treat your employees as your family members,” infiltrated deeply into the consciousness of those young female work- ers. More striking is how model workers, lacking working-class identity, were indifferent to the labor movement; they would attribute their miseries and poverty not to the social structure but to individual misfortune. The totalitarian collective training by government organizations which model workers found thrilling and exciting forged their way of thinking in the spirit of micro-fascism. Thus it is not only political oppression but also workers’ consensus that main- tained the developmental dictatorship in the 1970s; workers’ consensus is the key to explaining the oxymoron of their voluntary mobilization. Cultural Histories of the Korean Working Class 171 Gender as an analytical category has been neglected in Korean labor his- toriography. Nation and class have overwhelmed other identities such as gender, ethnicity, and religion. Kyung-ah Shin (Ewha Women’s University) addressed women’s work experiences and identity crises. She illustrated how, in addition to the general sexual discrimination through which female workers are “first fired, last hired,” the lack of support for them in their roles as mothers makes it difficult for them to be workers and mothers at the same time. Confucian cul- ture, in which it is a norm for a mother to sacrifice for her children and family, makes it more difficult for female workers to justify devoting their time and en- ergy to their job. As a result, most female workers undergo mental and physical stress and tend to work irregular hours at part-time jobs and have discontinuous careers in order to achieve a balance between working and mothering. Here the categories of women workers and atypical workers overlap. Young-sam Park, the head of the policy department for the Korean Con- tingent Workers Center (KCWC), is knocking on the door of “New Unionism.” He has pointed out that since the mid-1990s, capital’s rationalizing strategy and the government’s neoliberal deregulation policies have sharpened potential con- flicts between regular and non-regular workers, male and female workers, and large and small-to-medium companies. The problem is that the KTCU did not take effective action against the “divide and rule” strategy of achieving labor flexibility. Organized workers in big companies, mainly affiliated with the KTCU, were reluctant to take solidarity actions with new marginal workers of subcon- tracting firms or atypical workers in the same factory. Rather, organized regular workers barred contingent workers from acquiring union membership by the union constitution and interfered in the contingent workers’ organizing process for fear of losing their own jobs. Voices for progressive social reform such as a shorter work week grow weak while organized workers demand more overtime to tackle inflation and decreasing incomes. In short, these workers tend to pur- sue short-term rather than long-and-medium-term interests. In recent years hundreds of unions formed by temporary and part-time workers, not affiliated with the KTCU, are making new solidarity chains be- tween labor and students, labor and civil movements, and regular and contin- gent workers. Reflection on the history of the Korean labor movement should lead Korean labor to “New Unionism,” its demands including non-discrimina- tion, regularization, and equal labor rights. While the past democratic trade union movement in Korea pursued a distributional justice in a time of high growth, “New Unionism” proposes the improvement of working life in the age of lower growth. As for labor historiography in Korea, “New Unionism” de- mands a kind of paradigmatic turn from hard history to soft history. It would broaden the perspective of Korean labor historiography from the class-centered male metropolitan proletariat to working subalterns including women, atypical, and foreign workers. From the viewpoint of soft history, a film report made by the “Labor Re- porters’ Network” was interesting. The film report recorded various incidents that took place at the Hyundai Motors Ulsan factory during years 1998–2000. 172 ILWCH, 61, Spring 2002 In a drastic way it showed how the language of ordinary workers was different from that of union leadership.
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