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6 I N T R O D U C T I O N REDISCOVERING THE 1960S LABOR MOVEMENT Assumptions about the negative historical legacies of the colonial period and the defeat of the left in the postwar period prescribe in turn a view emphasizing the suffering and inactivity of labor under the anticommunist regimes of Rhee during the 1950s and Park during the 1960s. The standard view of the South Korean labor movement of the 1950s and 1960s is that it was thoroughly repressed and quiescent. And because there was no meaningful labor activism during this time, it makes little sense to study labor in this period. A typical recent assessment is provided by historian Namhee Lee: “Workers in the 1970s, therefore, not only were a generation removed from the militant labor mobilization of the immediate post-1945 period but also were without any social or collective memory of such a movement.”6 This line of reasoning leaves little place for the militant unionism of KSEC workers described in this book. Even the rare studies that include discussion of organized labor in South Korea in the 1960s conclude that labor overall was weak and severely constrained by state control. One example is an unpublished doctoral dissertation in the field of industrial relations, written by the U.S.-trained Methodist minister and scholar George Ogle.7 Another example is the book by the South Korean political scientist Jang Jip Choi, which analyzes the labor-state relationship in the 1960s and 1970s.8 Both works seek to explain organized labor’s weakness during the 1960s and 1970s, but because they pay close attention to the workings of the 1960s labor politics itself, a more complex and dynamic image of the union movement of the period comes through than is typical of most of the literature in the field. Ogle was a participant-observer of the South Korean labor scene and wrote his dissertation based on his own observations and interviews with unionists in the thick of labor disputes.9 Clearly influenced by the assumptions of modernization theory and emphasizing the overwhelming power of “traditional” Korean values such as the “father-son relationship,” Ogle argued that these values cast a long shadow over industrial relations and greatly contributed to the weakness of organized labor. Although he chronicled cases of labor militancy and autonomous unionism in the 1960s, and included information on the KSEC union case, he treated such cases as exceptions that do not affect his overall understanding of the “weak” labor movement of South Korea. Choi’s book is the only comprehensive study of the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (the Han’guk Nodong Chohap Ch’ong Yŏnmaeng; hereafter, the FKTU) during the Park Chung Hee era. It analyzes the workings of three indus- I N T R O D U C T I O N 7 trial union federations—textile, metal, and chemical—and argues that organized labor at the national level was an active, yet not very influential, participant in the power politics of the authoritarian regime.10 My discussion in this book of the Korean Maritime Trade Union Federation (the Chŏn’guk Haesang Nodong Chohap Yŏnmaeng; hereafter, the Maritime Union), another of the industrial union federations under the FKTU, reveals a much more activist industrial union than the industrial unions featured in Choi’s study. As we shall see, the Maritime Union initiated and supported vigorous organizing drives and strikes of local unions affiliated with it, including the KSEC local. Study of the KSEC local and its relations with the Maritime Union, I argue, points to the need to substantially qualify Choi’s argument about the corporatist nature of national-level labor politics of the 1960s. By looking at what was going on at the local level during the presumably “dark years” of the South Korean labor movement, I show that at least in some crucial sectors a democratic and militant unionism developed during the 1960s, providing a missing link between the labor militancy of the immediate postwar years and that of the 1980s. RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF THE PARK CHUNG HEE REGIME Why does recovering the history of 1960s South Korean labor activism matter? It matters not only because it challenges us to rethink the dynamics of labor activism over the whole sweep of postwar and even twentieth-century Korean history. It also matters because it forces us to pay as much attention to certain continuities and positive legacies of the past as to negative...

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