Ok, I lied...

And I am commenting on this two days later but forgive me. I did not get home until 5 am Tuesday.

I have been mentally chewing on the recent escalation issue for a while now, and have been talking to several people about this. Things have been escalating for a while now and has quickly gained international attention by both NGOs and even western media. As time goes by it is becoming less likely that this is just going to be another weak strike that took place in July but will be a revival of the labor uprising that took place during the 1997 financial crisis.

One of the little random tidbits I discovered during my studies is that there seems to be a giant upsurge of worker activity about every 10 years give or take since independence. The uprisings of 79, 87 and 96-97 being the most famous along with the frequently overlooked upsurges during the post-independence era and the April Revolution in 1960. I guess one can say Korea is due for another upsurge which should cause some hope for labor organizers in Korea.

The question that remains on the table is whether or not an upsurge would give labor in Korea its first major victory. All but the 96-97 movements ended with violent repression by the state. The strikes that started in 1997 ended with the Korean equivalent of Reuther's Treaty of Detroit (The unions would accept IMF's economic reforms in exchange for political recognition of the KCTU).

The Korean government has generally moved away from violent repression towards more legalistic and neoliberal policies to keep things under order. Any sort of informal peace treaties seem unlikely considering that President Lee does not have the connections and respect that Kim Dae-jung did with the labor movement. Because of this, I find myself a bit more optimistic than some of my colleagues that there will be some victory for organized labor in Korea this time around. South Korean society is not as capitalist as many people think it is and there still remains bitterness towards the IMF reforms. What the KCTU and FKTU need to do is (a.) paint the struggle in pure democratic and anti-neoliberal language instead of just economic and legal terms and (b.) let grassroots activism take shape and a be forefront of the struggle. If they don't, eh, we have to wait another ten years I guess.