The Hyundai strike

Korean industrialization took place under the most authoritarian conditions possible, with a despotic military dictatorship that applied almost prisoner-like conditions in the workplace. The first to revolt were the women in the textile industry – often relatively small workplaces in hovels but gathered in larger industrial areas. In 1976, the textile workers at Dongil took over the hitherto company-led union and for a few years managed to assert their right to freedom of association, despite the company’s hired fighters and brutal riot police, mainly by establishing collaborations with churches and students fighting for democratization. They were eventually silenced through dismissal and violence, but bequeathed a tradition of co-operation between the labor movement and democratization efforts that sometimes – especially since the death of military dictator Pak in 1979 – spread throughout society.

However, a new military dictatorship soon took office that suppressed the popular movements and encouraged the growth of the engineering industry with assembly lines. After a decade of semi-secret organizing in cultural associations and evening classes, the workers of Hyundai's huge industrial complex in Ulsan struck in the summer of 1987.

They had, also partly in secret, set up banned trade unions at each workplace separately, and in August they appointed a joint negotiating delegation that demanded negotiations with the group management – on their list of demands was the right to chose their own hairstyle, and union right to negotiate wages. When the company refused, the workers organized a demonstration with 60,000 participants into the city center, led by the company’s fire trucks and sandblasting machines. The riot police who intended to use their usual tactics against them saw fit to withdraw and the Minister of Labor came and promised to meet all the demands of the workers.

However, Hyundai’s patriarch did not care about the labor minister but closed the factories and called for even more riot police – with the consequence that a general strike in Ulsan and ten days of street fighting broke out. Then the operation started again without either party having given in the slightest, and for a couple of years strikes and riot police attacks wavered back and forth until the company in practice gave in on all points without admitting it in public.

Koo believes that the strength of the workers had the following roots:
- the extremely humiliating despotism of companies left no choice
- the regime became increasingly isolated from both workers and the middle class who increasingly perceived themselves as ”the people”, minjung in Korean, separate from the elite, and thus with strong interests of cooperation.

As both of these factors, thanks to the success of the workers, have thinned since 1990, the labor movement has also weakened, and to this has of course contributed the relocation of some industries to China. But the labor movement has nevertheless considered it worthwhile to defend its successes with general strikes and much tougher behavior than its European counterparts.

Reading
Hagen Koo: Korean Workers, Cornell University Press 2001