Korean Suicide Protest as Anomic Response to Labour Disempowerment

Authors

  • Minsun Ji University of Colorado Denver

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v11i3.4050

Abstract

The article argues that the growth of worker protest suicide in the 2000s in South Korea is related
to current neo-liberal political-economic conditions in Korea, including: 1) the growing crisis facing
increasingly irregular and part-time workers, and 2) the construction of an anti-labour legal regime
giving Korean workers few legal options for collective engagement in workplace actions. Legal
obstacles facing labour activists include both business and state actors increasingly using
compensation lawsuits and provisional seizure tactics to seize the assets of unions and striking
workers. As the Korean labour movement finds itself increasingly marginalised by the crippling
anti-labour legal innovations of the last two decades, labour resistance has increasingly manifested
in extreme forms of individualistic protests, such as worker suicide. Though products of anomic
despair, these suicides retain the capacity to inspire collective labour action and to leverage change.
KEYWORDS: labour movement; protest suicide; provisional seizure; neo-liberalism; Korea

Downloads

Published

2020-09-30

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 3 (2020): September 2020

Section

ARTICLES

License

Global Labour Journal's authors grant the journal permission to publish, but they retain copyright of their manuscripts. The Global Labour Journal applies a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

Under the terms of this licensing framework anyone is free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work, under the following conditions:

  1. Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
  2. Noncommercial Use: You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
  3. No Derivative Works: You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder, the author of the piece. The author's moral rights are retained in this license.