Small Urban Manufacturers

책 소개

Preface Finding fresh hopes in mom-and-pop manufacturers This book is a sequel to They Are Not Machines (Ashgate, 2003), which focused on the lives and struggles of Korean women workers who worked in manufacturing in the 1960s and the 1970s. Impoverished by Japanese occupation (1910?1945) and the Korean War (1950?1953), Korea had turned into one of the poorest countries in the world, with the gross national income per capita amounting to a meager USD 67 by 953. The compressed and astonishing industrialization of the country in the following two decades, however, kept the national economy growing at almost 10 percent a year. The abrupt expansion of the Korean economy made the country export USD 10 billion worth of goods in cumulative total by 1977, helping it achieve the so-called Miracle of the Han River and set an example for other developing economies worldwide. They Are Not Machines featured the hidden and untold stories of the suffering, alienation and solidarity of women workers in Korea without whom the nation’s economic transformation would not have been possible. Born and raised in abject poverty and facing discrimination against women from birth onward, young teenage girls in Korea were forced to work for next-to-nothing pays in countless shops and factories of light manufacturing, producing textiles, apparel, wigs, leather goods and shoes that led Korea’s industrialization. These poor girls worked under the low ceilings of barely lit and poorly ventilated sweatshops, denied even the chances to make the needed trips to bathrooms and working tirelessly for 98 hours a week for pays that were far below the minimum wage level. I, myself, began working at a sweatshop at age 16, and continued work in the clothesmaking and leather goods shops at the Pyeonghwa Market for seven years afterward. I am personally acquainted with the miserable working conditions and lives of women my age. Shortly after I became acquainted with labor activism, in November 1970, a tragic event occurred that accelerated the spread of unionism throughout Korea: namely, the self-immolation of Chun Tae-il, my own older brother and a fellow worker of the Pyeonghwa Market, who poured gasoline over and lit himself, demanding that factory owners abide by the Labor Standards Act and shouting that we were not machines. He lived an all too brief span of 22 years on this planet. But his death awakened the society from its willful blindness about the dire conditions facing workers and raised the public awareness of workers’ rights. His self-immolation also served to unite the workers of the Pyeonghwa Market into forming the Cheonggye Apparel Labor Union, which went onto play a pivotal role in labor activism, solidarity and the democratization movement in Korea. I bore witness to the entire process. Koreans finally achieved the direct presidential election system in June 1987 after years of struggle for democratization. In the following July through September, labor strikes were held nationwide to win the government’s authorization on the creation of democratic labor unions, pay raises and working environment improvements. After a brief break, the democratization groups in Korea entered debates of growing intensity over where they should be headed in the future. Having realized the importance of achieving solidarity with the labor unions of other countries around the world, I decided to learn about the wider world. In 1989, I left for the United Kingdom, and studied comparative labor relations of Europe and the sociology of labor there. In 2001, I finally published my doctoral dissertation, entitled They Are Not Machines, undeniably taken from the dying words of my brother. In 1998, I returned to Korea briefly to do field work for my dissertation. During those five months, one question gripped me. The Korean society has been developing at a rapid pace since 1970, but why do workers face the same living conditions? Why do these makers of the Miracle of the Han Ri…

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