Happy Workers’ Day!

https://ws.or.kr/article/11676

On August 6, 1987, Hyundai Group chairman Chung Ju-yung appeared at Hyundai Heavy Industries. The “king chairman” personally stepped in to stop the workers’ struggles and the formation of democratic unions that had begun spreading through Hyundai Group factories in Ulsan in July.

Workers stormed the company gymnasium, where Chung Ju-yung was lecturing managers, and demanded negotiations. Overwhelmed, he had no choice but to head to the field where around 20,000 workers had gathered.

At that moment, a worker threw dirt at him. This was because Chung had often said, “I will not allow unions until dirt gets into my eyes.”

That summer, when such anger and determination from workers erupted across the country, not only at Hyundai Group but nationwide, the military-style workplace control under the military dictatorship collapsed. In just those three months, over 1,000 democratic unions were newly formed.

Workers who took up the struggle were no longer looked down upon as “factory boys and girls.” They were no longer fools who endured abuse from managers without protest. They no longer had to undergo inspections of clothing and hair at the factory gates or have their hair cut. They no longer had to eat company-provided lunches “mixed with black specks like rat droppings.”

Now they had secured the right to improve wages and working conditions through strikes and labor disputes. As a result, that autumn they won revisions to labor laws, including easing requirements for forming unions and reducing legal working hours by four hours. Over the next three years, they achieved annual wage increases of 10–30 percent.

“Rat droppings”

In fact, since the 1960s, South Korea’s economic growth had been built on the exploitation of workers and the masses by the dictatorship and business owners. The longest working hours in the world, low wages, military-style workplace control, and social contempt were what workers received during the so-called “era of the economic miracle.”

Under dictatorship, it was not easy for workers to independently form unions or improve conditions. Large conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai were able to grow into giants thanks to this repression.

However, as Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “As capital develops… the modern working class develops… The bourgeoisie produces, above all, its own grave-diggers (the working class).”

The dictatorship and business owners suppressed and squeezed workers for economic growth, but that growth created a larger working class and concentrated them in cities and bigger factories. Wage workers, about 7 million in the early years of Park Chung-hee’s rule, grew to over 15 million by the mid-1980s. The so-called “economic miracle” was also growing another giant of modern capitalism: the working class.

Moreover, from 1987, South Korea entered what was called the “greatest economic boom since Dangun.” This provided the conditions for workers, grown both quantitatively and qualitatively, to gain the confidence to fight.

The 1987 democratization struggle did not suffer a backlash from the military like the April 19 Revolution or the 1980 “Spring of Seoul” because this giant had finally begun to stir.

From early in the year to June, the uprising involved liberal opposition parties, militant student movements, and various social groups, making it a “national” struggle. Labor leaders made up less than 5 percent of the leadership of the June uprising’s main coalition.

This was likely due to repression under Chun Doo-hwan. Still, workers’ participation increased steadily during the struggle.

As the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in Mass Strike, the June uprising that pushed back military dictatorship created fertile ground for broader workplace struggles for democracy.

Once the Chun regime retreated, the great workers’ struggle erupted. Workers who had individually participated in the June uprising now sought to bring democracy from the streets into their workplaces. Meanwhile, liberal opposition parties distanced themselves from the workers’ struggle.

Workers, who had gradually developed their movement and consciousness even under dictatorship, sought to improve conditions not through one-off struggles but through building independent unions.

Kim Jin-sook once expressed the desire to build democratic unions:

“Workers cannot give up democratic unions because without them there is nothing to protect themselves… Through that, I was finally able to declare that I too am a worker, that I too am human.”

A decisive turning point came on July 5, when a democratic union was formed at Hyundai Engine in Ulsan. Once the “no-union kingdom” of Hyundai was breached, unionization and struggle rapidly spread to Hyundai Mipo Dockyard, Hyundai Heavy Industries, and Hyundai Motor.

Democratic unions

When Hyundai attempted to block unionization by creating company-controlled unions, Ulsan workers launched solidarity strikes on August 17–18 and marched en masse through the city.

Facing a procession of 60,000 workers, including families and heavy equipment, even riot police were forced to retreat.

Once the dam burst, workers’ militancy surged uncontrollably. From July to September, more than 30 strikes occurred per day on average. Some statistics say this exceeded all disputes since the mid-1970s combined, or even all disputes since 1961.

Even Kwon Yong-mok, who led unionization at Hyundai, admitted he feared workers might go beyond control.

Given the oppressive conditions, forming unions inevitably led to factory occupations, strikes, and street battles with police. The typical pattern became “strike first, negotiate later.” The defining features of the movement were grassroots spontaneity, militancy, and self-organization.

Through the struggle, large-scale manufacturing workers emerged as the core of the democratic union movement.

Eighty-one percent of participants, about 990,000 people, were manufacturing workers. Ninety percent of disputes in non-union workplaces were also in manufacturing. The movement spread not from the Seoul metropolitan area, but from Ulsan through Busan, Masan, Changwon, and Geoje, and then nationwide.

From late August, the regime shifted to harsh repression. During this period, a Daewoo Shipbuilding worker, Lee Seok-kyu, was killed by a direct tear gas hit.

The working class, newly awakened and inexperienced, could not immediately build nationwide coordination or general strikes against state repression. The struggle began to subside by mid-September.

Nevertheless, its impact was immense. The Chun regime, which had even considered deploying troops in June, ultimately abandoned reaction in the face of the July–September labor uprising. The democratic union movement created a stronghold that made it difficult to reverse democratic gains.

Learning from the struggle, the labor movement continued to advance. Within two years, about 5,000 new unions were formed and 900,000 new members joined. After passing through organizations like the National Council of Trade Unions, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions was established in 1995. It led successful strikes against anti-labor laws in 1996–97 and later pursued political representation, entering parliament in 2004.

Today, as the labor movement faces renewed attacks amid global economic crisis, recalling the experience of 25 years ago is crucial. Workers showed that even under repression, unity and struggle are possible and can win. Through militant struggle, they proved that mass working-class strike movements are the true driving force of change and reform.

What was needed was national-level class politics. In today’s era of capitalist crisis, it is vital for socialists to draw lessons from this history and build organization capable of advancing political struggles.