In the weeks following the unprecedented mass mobilization known as the “Candlelight Revolution” that took place in the streets of Seoul's historic city center between late October 2016 and early March 2017, a small group of unionized workers staged a life-and-death drama. For twenty-seven consecutive days, they refused food, shelter, and access to running water and electricity while occupying a high-voltage billboard atop a ten-story commercial building located on the busy northwest corner of Kwanghwamun Square. Their presence was visible to passersby by a massive yellow banner flying 40 meters high that urged, “guarantee labor rights and protect workers’ livelihoods.” To magnify the optics of the perilous occupation, protesters on the ground set up an adjacent solidarity tent, disrupting the heavy foot traffic flowing in and out of the nearby #7 subway station exit with daily morning rallies, evening cultural gatherings, and late-night marches around the square. The primary target of their protest actions was Moon Jae-in, the front-runner in the upcoming special election who would go on to become the nation's president, whose repeated promises to bring about labor reform seemed less convincing as his popularity grew.Footnote 1 Their public-facing protests also sought to connect workers’ long-standing grievances regarding precarious or irregular employment (pijŏnggyujik) to the historic momentum of the Candlelight mobilization, which attracted the attention of millions of first-time protesters to a range of politically contentious issues, including labor rights.Footnote 2
Despite the maximal use of spectacle and disruption, the affectively charged scenes of crisis and emergency did little to pierce the jubilant mood. Buoyed by the feat of achieving the seemingly impossible—the ouster of President Park Geun-Hye—the newly awakened demos seemed engrossed in celebrating their historic victory. Longtime labor activist Kim Hye-Jin, who spearheaded the media outreach for the protest action, explained, “Workers were treated like ghosts. We did everything possible, including put workers’ lives on the line, but we could not get people to look at us even just once” (Kim Reference Kim2017). This neglect was consistent with the sense of isolation that protesting workers had felt throughout the six-month protest wave. Although the contingent of protesters who organized the Kwanghwamun Station high-altitude occupation had marched faithfully and steadfastly alongside hundreds of thousands of Candlelight Protest participants every Saturday night, they were acutely aware of their marginal status. One worker lamented, “We were continually rejected from speaking about workers’ problems on the Candlelight stage . . . It was as if no one wanted to deflate the mood. We remained as isolated as ever” (Yun Reference Yun2017). Their inability to attract the support of the organized labor movement intensified precarious workers’ sense of invisibility. Disheartened by the fact that the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the national umbrella organization representing the democratic labor movement, had set up a separate row of protest camps on the opposite side of the square without once visiting their encampment, they decided to end their simultaneous high-altitude occupation and hunger strike on May 10, 2017, well before many of the protesters had anticipated.
How do we make sense of the life-depriving character of workers’ protest practices and the crisis of solidarity that they evoke? Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic and agonizing character of the labor protests is frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Some of the most fervent critics are former democracy movement activists turned political leaders associated with the “386 generation”—people who were born in the 1960s, attended university in the 1980s, and reached their thirties after the dismantling of military rule. In contrast with their impassioned support of striking workers during the days of dictatorship, 386 generation leaders frequently renounce the principles of solidarity and alliance building that guided the minjung (people's) movements of the 1970s and 1980s (Lee Reference Lee, Shin and Chang2011).Footnote 3 The leading protagonists of the Candlelight Protests—which first erupted in 2002 and again in 2008—are also vocal critics of the “outdated” politics of the past. Led by a new generation of internet-savvy, pop-culture-consuming, and globally conscious youth, Candlelight Protesters tend to eschew the minjung movement's emphasis on self-sacrifice and collective suffering and instead celebrate the feelings of joy and pleasure linked to festival-like protests in the new millennium (Kang Reference Kang2016).Footnote 4 The KCTU's lack of support for precarious workers’ struggles is also attributed to generational shifts. Once heralded as “militant industrial warriors,” a shrinking core of unionized workers is now seen as a “labor aristocracy” that prioritizes its own job security and coveted employment status over the needs of an expanding workforce of precarious workers (Kim Reference Kim2020).
Indeed, generational shifts can impede the formation of broad-based solidarity, both between more militant and civic-minded protesters and among different groups of workers. However, an overreliance on generational explanations tends to obscure more than it clarifies, especially considering the kinds of postcolonial logics that have long repudiated the past as part of the nation's relentless pursuit to “catch up” with the “developed” world. Rather than dismiss the life-and-death dramas of protesting workers as anachronistic, this essay treats labor's disavowal as a constitutive feature of South Korea's capitalist democracy. As Hyun Ok Park (Reference Park2015, 35) astutely observes, instead of guaranteeing labor's democratic rights after the dismantling of military rule in the late 1980s, representative democratic states have used the primacy of the rule of law to ensure the “continuous dominance of capital and its mechanisms”—namely, universal protection for the private property rights of chaebol firms and their right to accumulate. South Korea's capitalist democracy is consistent with the global trend toward postdemocracy under neoliberal capitalism, in which “the egalitarian promise of democracy seems to have been undermined through elite capture and manipulation of the law” (Doucette and Kang Reference Doucette and Kang2018, 203). These intersecting and overlapping processes of democratization and neoliberalism have also constrained the political transitions of countries such as South Africa, which confronted profound limits on the horizons of socialist transformation under the market-driven imperatives of fin-de-siècle global capitalism (Adler and Webster Reference Adler and Webster1995; Williams Reference Williams2008).
The multifaceted attack on organized labor highlights deep dilemmas for workers protesting precarity. Confronted with more powerful and well-resourced opponents and denied access to existing labor rights and protections, workers are subject to the type of precarity that is more than a compounding experience of multiple forms of insecurity, be it in the form of informal or precarious jobs, the shrinking size of the public sector, or exclusionary citizenship laws (Standing Reference Standing2009). Precarity is a structural condition of “organized abandonment,” to borrow from Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Reference Gilmore2015). It is produced by a violent political economy that has further entrenched the rights of capital over the rights of labor through the fallacy of contractual equality under liberal democratic law. Because the state has enabled private capital to advance its anti-union agenda through the aggressive use of the law and the courts, the road to securing labor rights for workers protesting precarity far exceeds language.Footnote 5 In this context, precarious workers have turned to the affective charge of “life-and-death” repertoires, not merely to raise public visibility for their demands but as part of a painstaking pursuit to challenge the indignity of precarity under neoliberal capitalist rule.
To understand how workers’ protest repertoires are shaped by the conditions of organized abandonment, this essay shifts our conceptual framework from a politics of resistance to the labor of refusal. The protest repertoires of precarious workers in South Korea are more akin to the “structures of feeling” produced by changing political economies (Williams Reference Williams1977, 131–32) than the kind of flexible, modular, and strategic toolkits associated with the contentious politics literature (see Tilly and Tarrow Reference Tilly and Tarrow2007). Workers protesting precarity may enact the kinds of protests that defy “good sense,” jeopardizing their jobs and livelihoods in pursuit of elusive labor rights. However, they do so in ways that seek to “maintain and produce sociality through time,” cultivating affinities and solidarities that support everyday life in defiance of the structural contradictions of liberal capitalist democracy (Simpson Reference Simpson2016, 329).
Solidarity is the precondition for sustaining a willful politics of refusal. Building spaces of solidarity requires high levels of sustained commitment from external supporters, particularly as workers’ struggles become protracted over weeks, months, and sometimes years with no end in sight. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted before, during, and after the 2016–17 Candlelight Protests,Footnote 6 I show how the labor of refusal enacted by workers protesting precarity activates social movement networks and grassroots communities of care that equate solidarity with the practice of showing up and being there. Such support may not be reliable or broad-based; however, it highlights the ongoing production of collectivities-in-struggle in support of workers’ long-standing demands “to live like a human being” (in'gan dapge salgo sipda), a mobilizing cry that fueled the explosion of democratic unionism under authoritarian industrialization and continues to reverberate in the era of globalized neoliberal capitalism.
From Resistance to Refusal
To elaborate how South Korean workers’ protest repertoires enact the labor of refusal, we must shift our frame of reference away from theories of resistance, which have long dominated the scholarship on labor politics and popular protest (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1990; Scott Reference Scott1990). Leading anthropologists of refusal take issue with the concept of resistance for limiting the scope of social relations and political worlds that shape the character of popular politics (McGranahan Reference McGranahan2018; Simpson Reference Simpson2016). Rather than acknowledge the presence of alternative ways of knowing and acting outside the hegemonic gaze of state power, theories of resistance view defiant subjects though an overdetermined lens of domination and subordination, treating their politics as either scripted displays of public performance or hidden acts of resistance that take place “beyond the direct observation of powerholders” (Scott Reference Scott1990, 3–4). A similar critique was also elaborated by critical geographer Gillian Hart (Reference Hart1991, 117), who emphasized the need to recognize the complex ways in which intersecting inequalities along gender, class, and other axes of difference obscure the political agency of subordinated social actions such as poor rural women.
In contrast with notions of resistance, the politics of refusal “operates as the revenge of consent,” argues Audra Simpson (Reference Simpson2016, 330). It challenges the sole authority of the state and ruling elites to define the terms of recognition and defiance for subjugated peoples. For the Mowawks of Kahnawà:ke and Kanehsata:ke that Simpson follows, the labor of refusal is often painstaking and subjects dissenters to an onslaught of intimidation, suspicion, harassment, and violence—for example, when crossing national borders under a Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy passport or defending Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty. However, it insists on forms of political belonging that derive their legitimacy, not from the criteria of legal personhood, but in the affects and solidarity that circulate and find resonance in everyday life, be it “in memory, in conversation, in sociality” (Simpson Reference Simpson2014, 9). By asserting the primacy of ways of being and interacting with others rooted in solidaristic relations and communities of care, Simpson (Reference Simpson2014, 22) emphasizes that the “settler logics of elimination” remain unsettled, denied completion as a finished political project.
Analyzing the protest repertoires of South Korean workers as the labor of refusal departs from accounts that depict the turn toward agonizing and grueling protest forms as a devolution from collective to individualized forms of labor resistance. For example, the increasing phenomenon of high-altitude occupations or “sky protests” over two decades of neoliberal economic restructuring is characterized as “lone action[s], defensive and self-afflictive in method, with an extremely desperate message, but often without a clearly defined end strategy” (Lee Reference Lee2015). Similarly, the resurgence of protest suicides since the early 2000s is linked to the proliferation of an extreme protest repertoire in which workers facing mass layoffs and retaliatory firings as precarious workers have been “pushed to the brink” (Kim Reference Kim2021, 58).Footnote 7 Workers themselves also use terms such as “extreme” and “desperate” to explain why they choose to enact forms of protest that entail high levels of sacrifice and suffering, such as long-term tent encampments, head shaving, hunger strikes, Buddhist prostration rituals, high-altitude occupations, and suicide.
Certainly, the life-and-death stakes of protesting precarity are vivid and alarming. The decision to wage an indefinite hunger strike while occupying a high-voltage LED billboard is extremely dangerous and damaging to one's physical and mental well-being. It is “the kind of fight that literally tears your skin and bones apart . . . [and] the kind of fight you really should not actually do,” as one activist vividly put it.Footnote 8 These types of protests are also highly disruptive, compelling supporters to drop what they are doing and rush immediately to the scene of a life-threatening protest. However, imbuing “a general process like globalization” with the overarching power to “impact” the way people think, feel, and relate to each other tends to gloss over the significance of the felt and embodied aspects of protests.Footnote 9 Protest repertoires are more than vehicles that enable aggrieved actors to publicly express their discontent against ruling elites or win public support for their contentious claims. Protest repertoires are fundamentally affective and spatial. They circulate and gain traction through the doing and witnessing of protest as performative and intersubjective acts (see Alimi Reference Alimi, Porta and Diani2015). The places of protest are important in this discussion, but critical are the spatial relations that constitute what Doreen Massey (Reference Massey2005) calls the “simultaneity of stories-so-far”—that is, the material, emotional, and bodily relations that together produce spaces as sites of ongoing connection and possibility.
The protest practices discussed in the following section may appear extreme and desperate, yet close ethnographic attention to the labor of refusal that they enact reveals the significance of building spaces of solidarity that are rooted not in legal criteria and institutional recognition, but in the social interactions and mutual interdependencies that sustain everyday life (Simpson Reference Simpson2014).
Building Spaces of Solidarity
As noted in the opening paragraphs of this essay, the Kwanghwamun #7 exit struggle, as it came to be called by movement participants, was unsuccessful in achieving its stated goals. The inability to make labor issues more central to the Candlelight mobilization could be attributed to the disconnect between the protest cultures of militant workers and the sensibilities of newly activated protesters, many of whom who had never once attended a protest. Engaging in collective actions associated with militant labor unions was generally discouraged behind the scenes by the Organizing Committee for the 2016–17 Emergency People's Action for Park Geun-Hye's Resignation (Pak Kŭn-hye chŏngkwŏn t'oejin pisang kungmin haengdong), which represented a national coalition of 2,300 civic and nongovernmental groups. One Organizing Committee member explained that they routinely asked unionists and other longtime activists not to fly organizational flags or wear color-coordinated protest attire that might invoke fears and memories of protest violence.Footnote 10 The workers involved in the Kwanghwamun #7 exit struggle seemed to ignore this request, instead marching as an organized contingent, carrying colorful placards and flags, and wearing brightly colored yellow vests every Saturday night en route to the presidential Blue House. The exceptions, of course, were the bereaved parents of the 2014 Sewŏl ferry tragedy, who were immediately recognizable by their signature yellow jackets, umbrellas, and banners marching behind a protest truck that frequently played their protest anthem.Footnote 11
Interestingly, despite attempts to distance the Candlelight Protests from more radical social movement forces, the Emergency People's Action coalition included influential leaders and civic organizations associated with the minjung-inspired politics of the 1980s and 1990s. The co-coordinator of the Organizing Committee of the Emergency People's Action (T'oejin haengdong kongdong sanghwang siljang) was Lee Tae-ho, a veteran student movement activist with strong commitments to supporting labor, antimilitarism, and human rights struggles and general secretary of the leading civic organization People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (ch'amyŏ yŏndae). As the largest and most well-resourced organizational member, the 600,000 member-strong KCTU provided the kind of resources and movement know-how that helped stage massive open-air gatherings in the heart of downtown Seoul, including covering the steep costs of renting construction cranes that hung enormous speakers projecting amplified sound from giant projection screens. The Organizing Committee was also responsible for designing march routes, creating visual maps and signs identifying public bathrooms and first aid stations, designating places to find lost children, and putting together weekly Saturday evening programs with speakers, performances, and short video clips that reminded Candlelight Protesters of the depth and extent of wrongdoing by Park Geun-hye and her corrupt supporters. Thus, despite tendencies to downplay the influence of long-standing social movement actors, their role was apparent throughout the Candlelight mobilization.
This extensive social movement know-how was also evident throughout the Kwanghwamun #7 exit occupation. Support committee members were responsible for planning the daily actions, communicating with authorities, and constructing and taking down the solidarity tent. They also took turns being physically present throughout the duration of the struggle, watching over sound equipment, placards, seat cushions, cases of water and other supplies stored in the protest camp. I met two of the support committee members when visiting the protest tent a few days after the high-altitude occupation began. I was struck by the care they took in creating a visual landscape of solidarity. Photos of each individual protester occupying the building's rooftop were hung next to messages of support written on struggle headbands tied to a clothesline running across the front of the tent. Surrounding the tent were solidarity banners from various unions and political organizations. Also prominently displayed were the papier-mâché sculptures of the three “villains” of the Candlelight Protest mobilization—Park Geun-hye, Samsung heir Lee Jae-young, and Acting Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-Ahn—which the artist had arranged to move from its location next to the Sewŏl ferry protest site across the street to the sidewalk at the base of the solidarity tent to emphasize the connections between the workers’ fight and the Candlelight Protests. The use of public art, in addition to other visual protest practices, were crucial in transforming public spaces into contentious sites of spatial claims-making, a practice that was vibrant in many protest movements, from anti-eviction struggles waged by commercial tenants to the struggle for reparations for former comfort women and had flourished as part of the struggle of the bereaved parents of the Sewŏl ferry tragedy and, of course, the mass 2016–17 Candlelight Protests.
Creative and visually impactful forms of spatial claims-making are often associated with the externally oriented framing practices of public protests (see Benford and Snow Reference Benford and Snow2000), yet they also play an integral role in building spaces of care and community to support movement actors. Without a solidarity team in place, the act of risking one's life in a perilous high-altitude demonstration often fades from the horizon, beyond public view. “Being forgotten is the most difficult aspect of waging high-altitude occupations,” explained one of the six workers who participated in the Kwanghwamun #7 exit high-altitude occupation.Footnote 12 It further intensifies the sense of disposability and betrayal that precarious workers experience after getting fired for exercising their basic labor rights.
Kim Hye-Jin, the head of the Solidarity Center for the Abolition of Precarious Work (Pijŏnggyujik ch’ŏlp'ye yŏndae) and a founding member of the Support Response Committee for the protest action, underscored how a fairly standard practice such as the request for collective bargaining can spiral into series of events that leads precarious workers to adopt “extreme” tactics to fight their experience of disposability and abandonment. She recounted,
Typically, when unions begin a strike, it leads to negotiations with employers and collective bargaining. But, in Korea, collective bargaining is structurally and institutionally not possible for precarious workers. The protesting worker involved in the Kwanghwamun high-altitude occupation from Dongyang Cement can make demands such as “Legalize regular employment!” But even if the government recognizes their status, the subcontractor will just not go to the bargaining table. Without the presence of the subcontractor during the bargaining process, the [demands from the] laid-off worker [from Dongyang Cement for job reinstatement] was neglected for two years. Thus, even if the laid-off worker wants to bargain, there is no counterpart to bargain with legally. [Things] continually get dragged on in this context. From a worker's perspective, there is no choice but to use strength and force. But, for precarious workers, the majority who take this action get fired. Once fired, there are livelihood issues to deal with and the number of workers involved in the fight decreases, resulting in more difficult circumstances and more difficulties around using strength/force [to resolve a dispute]. So, the choices for workers, well, [are] extreme struggles that push struggles to the limit. It becomes a desperate situation where we have to push the horizon, organize solidarity, and let people know we are here.Footnote 13
For the workers who make the decision to “push struggles to the limit,” organizations like the Solidarity Center try their best to make sure that they do not do so alone.
Providing on-the-ground solidarity that can serve as a lifeline for protesting workers is often challenging, however, especially for budget-strapped organizations with few paid staff. The following case provides an example of what can occur when workers wage a high-altitude occupation:
A representative case involves two Pulmuone workers who engaged in an occupation in Yŏido. The area in front of the National Assembly is a place where union suppression is particularly severe, actually. Even though they went up, there was not much support and very little social awareness raised [about the action] and not much discussion was generated. Of course, a few people came out to support, playing the puk drums in front [of the building] and organizing marches. But, it was pretty short and limited. It's not easy for people to stay resolved when feeling so isolated. You just end up coming down since it's too hard to keep going like that. After coming down, you either end up taking the bus and going home or going to the police station. It's one of those two options. Most people go to the police station [to face criminal charges].Footnote 14
These workers, two truck drivers for the food products company Pulmone, had been spent months atop a 30-meter-high billboard tower in front of the National Assembly building. As leaders of the Cargo Truckers Solidarity Division of the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union, the two men were demanding increased rates (which had been frozen for twenty years), safer working conditions, and union recognition for truck drivers who were misclassified as “self-employed” because of their status as owner-operators.Footnote 15 For their participation in the union fight since September 2015, they were facing arrest.
There are multiple reasons why protest actions do not elicit substantial forms of external solidarity, which are beyond the scope of this essay to elaborate fully. One noteworthy reason, though, pertains to the kinds of relationships developed between protesting workers and supporting organizations. In the case of the Kwanghwamun #7 exit struggle, although external organizations and allies were not involved in the planning, a Support Response Committee was formed the day after the occupation began. The lack of consultation was not perceived as an affront, however. It reflected the distinction between what movement actors call tangsaja (those persons directly affected by an issue) and the people and organizations that support their struggles in solidarity. For high-altitude occupations led by tangsaja, there is usually an internal decision-making process in which they decide “whether and when to go up.” Then, they contact groups like the Solidarity Center to request support, saying “we have gone up, so join us,” after which point a support response committee is formed “which then discusses shared actions and divides up the roles for providing the kind of support needed.”Footnote 16 In this case, the tangsaja were six rank-and-file workers who were part of a national coalition of ten unions embroiled in long-term struggles around the country. They had learned how to work together and make decisions across many joint actions—and, of course, through the frequent and heavy use of social media and group texting through digital platforms like Telegram. They were also familiar with the experience of waging public disruptions at Kwanghwamun Square and other locations throughout the city. For example, to kick off their national coalition in 2015, they organized two days of contentious action, filled with press conferences, morning and evening rallies, late-night marches, and solidarity actions in support of various tent encampments set up by protesting workers throughout Seoul.
The participation of rank-and-file workers who had already built a base of public support for their long-term struggles helped create a broader support network for the Kwanghwamun #7 occupation. Yi In-gŭn, who was fifty-one years old and a leader of one of the longest-running union struggles to date by the Cort/Cor-tek branch union, had extensive experience with many different kinds of protest actions, including waging a simultaneous hunger strike and aerial occupation at an electricity transmission tower located on the Han River. On March 12, 2007, 56 out of 160 workers who assembled Cort-brand guitars were abruptly laid off as part of factory shutdowns that company management said were necessary to alleviate financial problems. The workers bitterly fought the company over unjust layoffs, citing the company's booming profits as one of the top three guitar manufacturers in the world.
Mired in contradictory court rulings over many years, the Cort/Cor-tek branch union's struggle attracted the support of musicians and youth in particular, who were familiar with Cort guitars and formed a solidarity band in 2011, holding lively solidarity concerts and providing a vibrant source of ongoing solidarity at protest sites. Because of serious health injuries sustained during his participation in previous hunger strikes, one that lasted forty days, Yi In-gŭn ended his Kwanghwamun billboard occupation on May 5. Yet, he persisted in his own union's fight for the next two years, until the company finally issued an official apology and agreed to reinstate him and other workers, marking an honorable end of their thirteen-year fight, the longest-running union fight to date (Cho Reference Cho2019).
One of the best known and most successful examples of a high-altitude occupation that received broad-based support was Kim Jin-suk's 309-day-long fight 35 meters above ground atop Crane 85 at the Yŏngdo shipyard in Pusan in 2011. A beloved and charismatic longtime labor activist who has been a militant rank-and-file union leader since her days as one of the few female welders in the shipbuilding industry in the 1980s, Kim Jin-suk waged one of the most high-profile and widely celebrated high-altitude protests in history. Although the occupation later became known for shifting the culture of labor protests from militant, indignant solemn struggles to more joyous, festive displays of external solidarity, she began her occupation overwhelmed by feelings of grief and guilt. Back in 2003, a rank-and-file leader of Hanjin Heavy Industries Union, Kim Ju-ik had hanged himself on the 129th day of his occupation at the very same crane in protest of the company's anti-union restructuring policies and its aggressive targeting of union leaders such as himself.Footnote 17 Haunted by the memories of her comrade's lonely death, Kim Jin-suk felt compelled to “sleep where he slept and see the world as he saw it” (Yun Reference Yun2011). She imagined Kim Ju-ik watching the number of supporters below him dwindle from 2,500 people at the start of his occupation to merely 60 people on the 129th day, becoming more despondent over time. Yet, unlike her comrade, Kim Jin-suk in 2011 was able to find connectivity with a growing number of supporters through social media and her now famed use of Twitter. A vibrant solidarity mobilization known as the Hope Bus movement ensued, which carried tens of thousands of supporters from diverse walks of life, including artists, labor and human rights activists, queer rights activists, students, progressive lawyers, teachers and journalists, and fellow unionists and many others, to the base of Crane 85 in Pusan to make sure Kim Jin-suk did not feel abandoned and alone. Not surprisingly, longtime labor activist Kim Hye-Jin served as chair of the Hope Bus mobilization, a role that resulted in punitive legal action against her and other Hope Bus participations.
The Hope Bus movement set a new precedent for mobilizing caravans of supporters to the site of high-altitude occupations taking place all around the country. On August 24, 2014, Hope Bus contingents traveled to the industrial smokestack at the Star Chemical factory in North Kyŏngsang Province on the 89th day of Cha Kwang-ho's high-altitude occupation, which would go on to last an unprecedented 408 days. They traveled to the Hyundai Motor factory in Ulsan, where Ch'oe Pyŏng-sŭng and Ch’ŏn Ŭi-bong were occupying the top of a 30-meter-high electricity pylon in protest of the company's unlawful use of labor dispatch agencies to hire manufacturing workers. The Hope Bus then traveled to a high-rise billboard in North Ch'ungch’ŏng Province to visit Yi Chŏng-hun, the head of the Yoo Sung (Yusŏng) Enterprise Union, who endured excessive police violence and a brutal anti-union intimidation campaign in retaliation for the union's two-hour strike demanding an end to the night shift, which had resulted in numerous occupational injuries and one worker's death. Yi Chŏng-hun recalled feeling particularly moved after the visit from Hope Bus supporters: “When I realized that there were so many people in solidarity with me, I felt like I was on top of the world. After the Hope Bus left, I had a lot of new Facebook friends, and total strangers even sent me money to carry on my fight” (Jeon Reference Jeon2014). Hope Bus caravans not only initiated a new phase of popular support for striking workers involved in grueling aerial occupations, but also they reinvigorated the practice of showing solidarity by expressing care and concern for the emotional and physical well-being of protesters.
The affective charge of building spaces of solidarity for supporters could also be seen during the Kwanghwamun #7 exit struggle. One evening, supporters gathered early at the base of the solidarity tent. As I walked toward the protest camp, I could smell the strong aroma of flour frying in hot oil on a humid summer evening. Once I arrived, I saw crowds of people eating, laughing, and enjoying themselves as they shared plates of freshly fried kimchi pancakes (chŏn) prepared by women who spooned heaping ladles of batter from large buckets onto outdoor frying pans in the food truck that was parked curbside. I had attended countless protests and solidarity events where people shared food in similar jovial settings, but this was the first time it was happening at a site where protesters were fasting and depriving themselves of food under dangerous and risky conditions. During an interview later with members of the Support Response Committee, I cautiously asked whether they found this kind of solidarity event centered around eating and conviviality inappropriate or even distressing. They hesitated briefly before quickly dismissing my concern. The whole point of their struggle, they emphasized, was to make sure other people do not have to suffer like precarious workers. And, they added, “of course, supporters need to stay nourished and strong to face the next challenge,” especially when events took a turn for the worse, which they almost always did at these types of protests.Footnote 18 This moment came sooner than expected.
On May 10, the protesters officially announced the end to their occupation. After a somber late morning press conference, approximately 100 people stood by as each protester was slowly and carefully accompanied down from the roof and rushed one by one in ambulances to the activist-oriented Noksaek Pyŏngwŏn (Green Hospital), where they received emergency treatment for dehydration and other life-threatening injuries.
The presence of people at the actual sites of protest is not only critical for attracting media interest; they also become part of communities of witnesses who remember, share, and rely on each other for critical forms of care. The fact that protesters were heading to the hospital Noksaek Pyŏngwŏn was not a coincidence. The medical staff at Noksaek Pyŏngwŏn, some of whom had direct experience as movement activists during the 1980s, had treated so many hunger strikers in the past that they created a manual on how to provide proper nutritional treatment, a level of awareness that other hospitals rarely had about treating patients who had endured long-term hunger strikes. They also understood the specific needs of patients who were admitted into their care after sustaining such isolating and dangerous protests. Unlike regular hospitals that do not allow visitors in the rooms of patients in critical condition, Noksaek Pyŏngwŏn was a place where protesters could find comfort and solace surrounded by their supporters. As one activist emphasized, “After coming down from isolated spaces, people need to see other people's faces and talk to other people. Those things are very important. Creating the most comfortable spaces is about understanding these things and caring about these relationships.”Footnote 19 While the Kwanghwamun Station #7 exit high-altitude occupation did not achieve its stated goals, the supporters who gathered to witness their protest and continued to care for them afterwards constituted a life-affirming practice, continually building and renewing spaces of solidarity that extended beyond the stated goals of protesters and the place-based sites of protest.
Conclusion: Solidarity in the Age of Organized Abandonment
In this essay, I have argued that the labor of refusal involved in enacting and sustaining long-term struggles produces vital solidarity relations for protesting workers in the context of organized abandonment. As Simpson (Reference Simpson2016, 329) reminds us, the labor of refusal is “a politics [that is] deeply cognizant of its own production [and] of the never-ending nature of inequity and the need to stay the course.” As workers “push the limits” and “expand the horizons” of what is considered possible, they reanimate the commitments of longtime allies as well as activate new supporters. On the most intimate level, their solidarity consists of the act of showing up and making sure that people engaged in perilous occupations at soaring heights do not feel alone or abandoned. As Ju Hui Judy Han (Reference Han, Cowen, Mitchell, Paradis and Story2020, 178) writes, “High-altitude protesters may be perched up in the air, but they are kept alive by their connectivity to the ground, illustrating the biopower of life-sustaining solidarity stretched vertically across space.” On an ontological level, their solidarity echoes protesting workers’ refusal that precarity is an already finished project that has subsumed people's lives and dignity to the contractual violence of marketized social relations. Affect, not ideology, is the catalytic force of solidarity, strengthening affinities and interdependencies that are based, not primarily in universal values or shared feelings, but in the everyday practices of providing care for one other in times of need.
Protesting workers in South Korea make enormous sacrifices and endure intense levels of deprivation and suffering in their efforts to sustain such high levels of sacrifice and suffering. Most workers lose their jobs and livelihoods, some workers lose their families, and a few lose their lives. Yet, in their refusal to accept the conditions of disposability and criminality that accompany labor precarity, they refuse to accept neoliberalism as an “epistemological structure of disavowal,” as Grace Kyungwon Hong (Reference Hong2015, 7–17) puts it, that affirms the idea that “protected life is offered to all” except to “those whose criminal actions and poor choices” make them deserving of “premature death.” Although Hong is referencing the political backlash against struggles for racial liberation by communities of color under racial capitalism in the United States, a similar dynamic can be seen in the backlash against labor militancy in South Korea's capitalist democracy, which has not only kept the violent political economies of postcolonial development in tact but strengthened its power under the democratic rule of law (Park Reference Park2015). By engaging in high-altitude occupations, hunger strikes, and other life-threatening protests, the workers examined here reject the disavowal of labor rights as political relics of the past and demonstrate their capacity to survive degraded conditions of existence with the support and care of other activists and organizational allies.
The costs and consequences of the labor of refusal raise sobering questions for how workers and other subjugated peoples can build power under the “organized abandonment” of global neoliberal capitalism (Gilmore Reference Gilmore2015). Confronted with the devolution of institutional responsibility for basic public welfare, workers and other subjugated groups have been left on their own to manage the exploitative and predatory practices of employers, finding ways to compete and cooperate with each other at the scale of their local communities and everyday lives. In South Korea, precarious workers experience organized abandonment on multiple scales—by the capitalist democratic state, anti-union firms, pro-business courts and public agencies, and even their own representative labor organizations, and thus, must find ways to maintain their livelihoods and advance their rights in the absence of the most basic forms of institutional and infrastructural support. While the significance of such localized and disconnected practices may seem irrelevant vis-à-vis the globalized resources and authority of political and economic elites, Avery Gordon (Reference Gordon2008, 23–25) reminds us that “if we want to study social life, and if in addition, we want to contribute, in however small measure, to changing it,” we need to “start with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or, more commonly with what we never even notice.” It is only by directing close and serious attention to the affects, everyday practices and social relations that are cultivated in support of a willful politics of refusal can we begin to understand how the struggles of South Korean workers extend the horizons of life, community, and emancipatory futures under the organized abandonment of neoliberal precarity.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Youngju Ryu for proposing this special forum and to Albert Park for his enthusiasm and support throughout the entire process. Ju Hui Judy Han, Hyun Ok Park, and Michelle Williams were wonderful interlocutors and critics. I give particular thanks to Ju Hui Judy Han for collaborating on this multiyear research project and coauthoring the broader book manuscript project to which this article is linked. Many of the ideas in this article are part of our collaborative writing and analysis. Garam Kwon, Ji-Won Lee, and Nathan Woo Jin Cho provided invaluable research assistance. Any and all shortcomings and flaws are mine alone.
Funding
The research for this multiyear project (2015–19) was provided by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant “Protesting Publics in South Korea,” No. 435-2015-0838.
Author Bio
Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department and the International Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
