Seoul Women's Trade Union: A Turning Point in the Korean Women Workers'
Movement
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.
by Yang-hee Cheong(President of SWTU)
* This paper was presented at the ATTAC international conference held in
Paris, Jun.1999.
