Hanjin union members were recently attacked by company workers for not settling for the company's offer.
Nine thousand college students, labor activists, and human rights advocates from across South Korea began to gather at the center of the port city of Busan July 9. They came to support a woman welder named Kim Jin-suk who has been staging a lone sit-in since January on top of a 115-foot shipyard crane. The demonstration became a 48-hour intermittent clash with riot police, who used clubs and fired tear gas liquid from water cannons to keep Kim’s supporters away.
Because of rows of police cordons, the protesters, who call themselves the Hope Riders, could not march about two miles to reach the shipyard of Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction Co. (HHIC), where the 52-year-old Kim has been squatting to protest job cuts. She is now waging one of the most important fights of her life after spending much of it helping build the independent labor movement in South Korea. The Hope Riders have called another big rally for July 30.
Death and fear of death are almost commonplace in the 30 years of the union movement at HHIC. In Salt Flower Trees, her memoir titled after the thick sweat salt stains on the gray Hanjin uniforms, Kim Jin-suk says that in the 1980s, so many workers died in industrial accidents that she had to spend most of her off hours attending funerals.
Things began to change in 1986, when Kim and Park Chang-su, another welder, organized a collective refusal to accept the rodent-infested lunchboxes provided by the company. Within a year they had formed an independent union.
In 1991, Park was found dead in the backyard of a hospital where he was being treated. The authoritarian Roh Tae-woo government of the time called his death a suicide, after a phalanx of police sledge-hammered their way through a wall of the mortuary and snatched Park’s body from his family.
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