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218 S H I P B U I L D I N G F O R T H E W O R L D M A R K E T raising and organizational support—a distinctive feature of the 1970s South Korean labor movement centered on female-dominated export industries—was conspicuously absent in the KSEC workers’ movement and marginal at best in the 1980s union movement among heavy-industry male workers. The autonomous character of the movement constitutes another connection between the 1960s and 1980s union movements among heavy-industry workers. The history of the KSEC workers we have followed since the 1940s demonstrates that the new surge of militancy from the mid-1980s did not mean the birth of a completely new democratic labor movement. Times changed and political and economic settings were much different, but what the KSEC workers aspired to and demanded in the 1960s and what workers called for in the 1980s were essentially the same—equitable distribution, democracy, voice, and respect for their status and human dignity. A major difference between the two movements is that the scope of the militant and democratic labor activism found in the 1960s KSEC workers’ movement broadened astonishingly in the 1987 labor upsurge. KSEC unionists in the late 1960s had a tough time organizing a solidarity struggle beyond their yard through the coordinating body of twelve unions at large state-managed enterprises, which represented the era’s most advanced and powerful unions. That alliance was feeble at best, and the KSEC union in the end had to face the state’s labor repression essentially alone. Following the 1987 strikes, in contrast, democratic unions developed numerous regional, national, occupational, and corporation-level councils and, after years of experimentation, were able to construct a strong new national labor central, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), in 1995, separate from the existing FKTU.65 “Solidarity [was] born” following the Great Workers’ Struggle of 1987, Hagen Koo concluded in his study of South Korean labor, and a more positive worker identity and political consciousness grew rapidly among South Korean workers.66 More than twenty years have now passed since the 1987 strikes. Workers have established unions and collective action as a legitimate part of industrial life. South Korean big business, even Hyundai and Samsung, and the state have been forced to learn to live with strong unions. An uneven but steady process of democratization during the past two decades in the political arena and social life, to which the labor movement has been a key contributor, has made a return to authoritarian rule very unlikely. Recently the South Korean labor movement even made an impressive and valuable political footprint in electoral politics when the newly created Democratic Labor Party (Minju Nodongdang; KDLP) candidates S H I P B U I L D I N G F O R T H E W O R L D M A R K E T 219 garnered 8.1 percent of the total vote in the 2001 local election, 3.8 percent in the December 2002 presidential election, and close to 13 percent in the April 2004 general election.67 It was an unprecedented success for a labor party in South Korea. The prospect for the South Korean union movement in the twenty-first century , however, is far from rosy and remains uncertain, as Koo’s thoughtful discussion of the complexities of the situation since the early 1990s suggests.68 Not long after the successful strike wave of 1987, South Korean unionists found themselves at a crossroad in the rapidly changing domestic and global economic conditions of the 1990s. Organized labor’s empowerment on the one hand and more sophisticated managerial and labor control strategies adopted as a counteroffensive by businesses and the state on the other led in the 1990s to a situation of increasing differentiation within the Korean working class “in terms of material conditions and consciousness” along the lines of gender, firm size, and regular/nonregular employment status.69 South Korean unionists now find themselves at a critical juncture in which they are searching for a democratic and feasible labor ideology that can inspire worker activism and generate greater societal support for the labor movement. Unionists have to make a historic decision, not just in rhetoric but in action, about whether to embrace the worse-off segments of the industrial working class, including temporary and part-time workers, workers dispatched from subcontracting companies, and foreign migrant workers, just as the KSEC...

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