South Korean Cort/Cor-Tek Guitar Workers' Action and the Politics of Digital International Solidarity

Introduction

I play a Cort guitar. I inherited it from my mother when she gave up on learning campfire songs. When she gave it to me, she said she had been told that Corts were known for having impressive sound quality for a surprisingly low price, but it was only about a decade later that it occurred to me to wonder why. The reason, I learned, has to do with an ongoing history of corporate violence and workers organizing against the South Korean Cort/Cor-Tek Guitars and Basses company. The company, in turn, has sought yet cheaper and more docile labour in China and Indonesia, keeping prices low and profits high even as Korean Cort/Cor-Tek workers (hereafter "Cort workers") have mounted an international solidarity campaign. Under the page heading "Workers' Stories" of the website Cort Guitar Workers ACTION!: Guitar Workers + Musicians United! (https://cortaction.wordpress.com) a litany of harrowing stories are framed by these lines:

For 10, 20, 30 years,

Working in solvent and fumes in factories without windows . . .

Forced to work overtime, and never able to see your family . . .

Injuries, harassment, verbal abuse . . . and the final indignity—a mass firing under the cover of a sham bankruptcy.

(Cort Action, n.d.e)

This article explores the trajectory of Cort Guitar Workers Action (CGWA) campaign against these injustices, showing how it has used the aesthetic force of popular music as an international language to forge solidary links with Western music industries, often using the enabling constraints of digitally mediated international solidarity.

In what follows, I synthesize a picture of CGWA from the nodes of what might be called the "weak network" of digital solidarity formed by the Cort/Cor-Tek workers. As we will see, it is a limited, yet meaningful, kind of solidarity that emerges through such a group "constituted by extensive, yet casual and limited social interaction" (Stalder 2013, 31). Weak digital networks are those where "lots of difference" can be accommodated since "the areas of shared understanding and knowledge are, by definition, limited" (Stalder 2013, 44), and that is certainly the case for CGWA. The movement materialized online through Korean- and English-language Wordpress blogs, Facebook pages, an English-language Twitter account, and a series of English-captioned YouTube videos, none of which support extensive ongoing online interaction. The hub of CGWA that is the cadre of dismissed Cort workers embodies (apparently acephalously) the discipline and strategy needed to sustain the project over time, while the social media presence creates "weak ties" (Granovetter 1973) to bridge outside itself. (These ties are also made in person at the many appearances CGWA makes at music festivals, trade shows and other events, but aside from manifesting the negative action of boycotting Cort, the activity of weak ties is channelled by CGWA back into the positive activity of posting and sharing campaign materials online. This practice is consistent with the findings of some studies that online and offline activisms are not independent constructs, but rather captured by a model of "hybrid activism" [ex. Milošević-Dordević and ŽeŽelj 2017]). Such weak ties, as Mark Granovetter (1973) famously argues in "The Strength of Weak Ties," are highly valuable for activism because "people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties" (1374). The greater the number of paths between a leader and followers, encourages trust, while "organizations dominated by strong ties tend to produce fragmentation and cliquishness, which quickly leads to the breakdown of trust" (Lehrer 2010).

As Felix Stalder notes in his book Digital Solidarity, network theory has taught us that it is possible to assume "that two random people are connected to each other by an average of six nodes [intermediary connections]," and on social networking sites like Facebook, the last measured average distance between users (in 2011) was 4.74 "hops" (2013, 45). Although there are fears that we may become once again isolated from these networks of difference by "filter bubbles" (the filter bubble describes the effect of new algorithms in personalized searches that yield results...