the management, and for building class-consciousness.
The women factory worker’s labor struggle is significant in South Korea’s
democratization movement in that it raised such issues as rights and equality. While
lacking a feminist consciousness, they clearly demanded worker’s rights and
nondiscriminatory equality at work (e.g., against sex discrimination in wages, promotion,
job classifications). In terms of wages, women were making only 43.4 percent of men’s
wages in 1978. Despite improvements in recent decades, a gender based wage gap
continues: Women’s wages were on average 63.3 percent (1999) and 63.2 percent (2002)
of men’s wages. (The Ministry of Gender Equality, web site data, 2001 & 2002) Focus
on women laborers’ rights and equality was, as a matter of fact, new to the women’s
movement in South Korea. Throughout its long women’s movement history, focal issues
were nonwomen-specific, larger social issues such as nationalism, anti- colonialism,
national independence (during the first half of the twentieth century), liberalization and
anti-communism (particularly during the post-war era), and democratization and national
unification (in recent decades). A women’s campaign for their own rights and equality
did not emerge until the early 1970s when industrialization became a new social agenda
and there were larger numbers of women wage-earners. Protest strategy wise, women’s
labor activism often became very militant, adding new tactics to women’s conventional
protest movements (e.g., peaceful marches, signature-gathering, public lectures, etc.).
9
Women’s global factory work places clearly became part of a new political
space. Most factory workers were migrants from poverty-stricken rural areas whose
political interests found no place in South Korea’s formal political institutions, nor would
these interests be articulated via social organizations (e.g., women’s
organizations). Many work-related improvements, while far from ideal were obtained
through their own struggle, at their own initiation, and with little support from outside
their work system. Mainstream women’s organizations in South Korea prior to the 1980s
were conservative in orientation and elite-and-middle-class-centered, with little support
given to the women workers’ labor movement. There was no evidence of political women
working to improve worker’s rights. They lacked a feminist consciousness.
The 1970s experienced other new social phenomena when some women college
students began to join with the broader democratization movements and began to work
Due to government’s tight control on labor, throughout the 1960s, labor protests occurred infrequently but
they were militant once they occurred.
Convention