Memories of Labor, Identities of the Time: Workers and Intellectuals in Korea’s Labor Movement of the 1980s

Abstract

The role industrial workers played in the democracy movement in South Korea in the 1980s has been viewed as one of limited importance in the mainstream literature of modern Korean history, which highlights the role played by students and intellectuals. This assessment is based on a particular understanding of the nature of the 1980s labor movement, an understanding that celebrates the “worker–student alliance” as the cornerstone of the successful marriage between the minju (democratic) labor movement and the larger democracy movement. This chapter complicates this dominant discourse of the minju democracy movement by examining workers’ experiences and memories using newly available oral history and life history materials that help reveal the interior world of workers. By looking into the tension-ridden relationship between the two partners in the worker–student alliance of the early 1980s, the chapter seeks to illuminate the diverse and complicated ways female workers forged their identities in the radical labor movement of the era. Focusing on workers’ views of the vision and strategies of the labor movement and their understanding of the worker–intellectual relationship in the worker–student alliance, the chapter categorizes the participants of the 1980s minju labor movement in South Korea into three types: those who developed the vanguard intellectual identity, those who showed a workshop-centered worker identity, and those in between these two poles (the transitional identity). Four elements that informed and influenced identity formation process—gender, age/generation, religion, and education/knowledge—are then explored. By revealing fragmented stories and the voices of workers, this chapter aims to illuminate what it meant to workers to become involved in the 1980s labor movement, and through it, become connected to the larger democracy movement.