Encountering Women’s Lives While Organizing Labor at Factory

“My Feminism”: Feminist Activist Narang (1)

Narang | 기사입력 2022/12/10 [22:50]

Encountering Women’s Lives While Organizing Labor at Factory

“My Feminism”: Feminist Activist Narang (1)

Narang | 입력 : 2022/12/10 [22:50]

A student activist who wanted recognition from militant male senior activists

 

Due to the influence of my 8th grade homeroom teacher, a member of the teachers union, I began to participate in student activism as soon as I entered university.

 

It was the late 1990s, but our student group was a place for nuts, fervent commies, and authentic (?!) Marxist-Leninists who didn’t accept post-Marxism even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and its atmosphere was intense. I took to it like a fish to water, holding rallies and wrap-up sessions during the semester and rallies and seminars during breaks, and running around feverishly, competing with my comrades to attend every rally (though not every class…).

 

To me, a person who had been dissatisfied with many things about the world since childhood, Marxism as a worldview was the only key that could change this world full of contradictions. I felt a certain sense of liberation when I participated in rallies, occupying the street and jumping around. When hundreds, thousands of arms were raised towards the sky in struggle all at once, the feelings that overflowed from my chest had a worth that made up for my low grades and numerous academic-probation warnings.

 

However, though I diligently attended rallies like that, a sense of despair that I could never be part of the spearhead [the group of male demonstrators who come to the frontlines of demonstrations when violent confrontations with police are expected] began to creep over me. I hated having to stand by on tiptoes and watch as part of the ranks who worried about the spearhead, while they were fighting at the front.  It gave me a feeling that I was perhaps somehow less committed, less intense than my male comrades. I was envious that they went up there and got their heads cracked open.

 

Though in reality I had to move my body as fast as I could just not to be caught by the riot police, in my heart I was part of the spearhead… I was as sincere about the activism as anyone, but a serious kid was all I was. I wasn’t good enough at making speeches or writing to receive recognition from the older activists.

 

There was a women’s organization at my university, and a school magazine made by female students, but I wasn’t interested. I dismissed them as “limited activism” done by “reformists.”

 

Once, at school, I made a handwritten poster to welcome laborers who were temporarily staying at our university while striking. The title was, “Laborer Brothers, We Welcome You.” A younger activist who was a feminist took issue with that, so I said, “Okay. ‘Brothers and Sisters’ would be fine, right?” But I was still using the terms for “older brother” and “older sister” that only men use. Oh, such a dark, shameful history!

 

▲ I got dreaming of revolution and using a false identity to get a job in a factory (pixabay)

 

In order to become Lenin’s “professional revolutionary”

 

Thinking about it now, because of some strong-willed senior female activists, sexual violence and everyday gender discrimination didn’t run rampant in our department (as far as I knew). However, it wasn’t the female activists who went home on the last train, but the militant male activists who stayed and drank until dawn from whom I wanted to receive recognition.

 

At university, I think I appeared a little dark, depressed, and frustrated. Thinking about it now, the more energy I spent suppressing my true nature, the more I must have been thrown into those shadows.

 

But at that time, I didn’t have the time to consider it thoroughly. Between my true nature and my duty, I chose duty without even taking the time to explore my true nature, and I suffered under coercion that I had to fit myself to the ideal of an activist that that duty called for—the “professional revolutionary” that Lenin spoke of.

 

I liked literature. When I read novels, it seemed liked I could understand and accept the novels’ main characters and all the people in the world. But that wasn’t acceptable. For us, the division between enemies and comrades had to be definite, and indecisiveness was a petit bourgeois characteristic.

 

So it was that around the time I graduated, I took the novels I had to my major’s department lounge and announced, “From now on, I won’t read novels, only social sciences writings, so you all can have these.” Perhaps because I was pitifully inflexible, I couldn’t make the two coexist within me, and it was painful.

 

Dreaming of revolution and using a false identity to get a job in a factory

 

When deciding my life path, as well, I felt that I needed to go to the “center,” not the “periphery” (I mistakenly believed that if I went to the center, I could become the center). Though I was among a minority doing so, I was participating in “authentic” socialist activism, so I felt I needed to go to a large-scale factory—the main foothold for revolution that Marx spoke of.

 

Hiding the fact that I was college-educated, I got a job with an in-house subcontractor of a large automobile manufacturer. People stare at me with surprise when I say that I lied about my background to become a manual laborer in the early 2000s [because doing that kind of thing was much more common in the 1970s-1980s], but there were a few cases of others who started in student activism and went to large-scale factories around that time.

 

At that time, the struggle over “temporary” work was just beginning as a labor union was being formed in Halla Heavy Industries’ in-house subcontractor, and many were pointing out the need to organize laborers in other large factories’ in-house subcontractors. I embraced this task of the time and went to the literal “site of the action.”

 

For five years, I worked 12-hour shifts during the day or night making car bumpers at a factory that was more than 90% men. I was part of a group who organized a labor union for temporary workers and went on strike. At the factory, the fact that I was a woman became apparent to me as a real issue. At university, I had lived as an honorary man, and at least when I lived like that, the tendency of others to objectify me as a woman was lessened. The way this place was structured, though, I couldn’t become a man even if I wanted to.

 

The company I worked for was an in-house contracting business, and most of my coworkers were middle-aged women. I naturally became friendly with them. In the course of forming a labor union and striking, I also become close with female laborers from another business.

 

Women laborers fought much more militantly and on their own steam than male laborers.

 

Most of the in-house subcontractor workers were people who lived in that area, in that farming village, and many of them had gotten their jobs through personal connections. In that farming village, the male laborers bound by blood ties, local ties, and school ties had a lot to consider before taking action. Female laborers, though, had almost nothing to lose and so seemed to have no fear. In fact, it was to the degree that management would fill with male laborers jobs vacated by female laborers, for that reason.

 

Stories that my coworkers told, more vivid than any theory

 

They say that laborers’ struggle commonly becomes bureaucratized and lethargic, but the female laborers I met weren’t like that. When, as the management was starting its attempt to destroy the temporary workers’ union and refusing to participate in group negotiation, we occupied the main assembly line of the factory as a last resort and carried out an 8-day death-before-surrender strike (one in which you don’t accept compromise with the management), the sight of them getting made up and dancing and partying merrily is still vivid in my mind.

 

These women spoke up fearlessly even to the management of the labor union for permanent workers, which was trying to curtail and control their struggle.  Furthermore, when around 200 cafeteria workers joined them, female laborers became a force that couldn’t be ignored, numerically.

 

With these “older sisters” (the female laborers), I made and was active in a women’s council. The stories that they shared of their lives were like dramas or novels. They had passed through so many trials and come to work and struggle at this place, and as they managed the labor union and studied they gained the ability to tell their stories.

 

Their stories had their own particular hues and scents that couldn’t be put into boxes of absolute enemies and comrades, or bourgeois, petit bourgeois and proletariat.  Their lives were more vivid than any theory I had learned about.

 

At that time, I hadn’t read any books about feminism, or listened to any lectures.  Yet feminism came to me, however vaguely, as the enjoyment of sharing and empathy, through people who had been considered unable to tell their stories or whose stories were not worth telling beginning to speak, and through listening to life narratives that had been hidden from the world.

 

Published: June 6, 2013

Translated by Marilyn Hook

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/6363

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

이 기사 좋아요
  • 도배방지 이미지

관련기사목록
광고
광고