How women helped pay the price of South Korean development

Daniel Nelson 

Some 40 years ago, development gurus like to say, South Korea and Ghana had the same income per capita. Now the gap gapes, with South Korea the world’s 11^th largest economy, having shifted to “developed, high-income” status in a single generation. 

Factory Complex

Image by Factory Complex

Its path to development travelled a harsh terrain. When I told a South Korean minister in the 1970s of my astonishment at how hard people worked, he said, “Yes, we have to press them really hard because in a generation they will resist and say they have made enough sacrifice.”

Many did, and the documentary Factory Complex focuses on a particular section of the workforce, then and now: girls and women. 

Very quietly and without commentary, the film lets women tell the stories, which include child labour (large factories often employed girls in an older sister’s name), appalling and often dangerous conditions, extremely low salaries, enforced overtime, harsh discipline and assault. 

“It was a living hell,” recalls one talking head.

Some workers became mentally ill: “It was just too much for us to bear.”

The women fought back, with demonstrations, strikes and unionisation. Employers resisted, often counter-attacking: one factory hired men to smear the protesting women with faeces. (“What they did was sub-human,” says the film’s only male interviewee.) 

Through struggle, gains were achieved. But some of the giant South Korean companies through which industrialisation was engineered exported their labour model, resulting, for example, in a workers’ protest and a murderous police backlash in Cambodia in 2014 – another indication of how politicians are generally in cahoots with employers, the moneyed elite against the “working poor”.

And pay and conditions are still often inadequate and discriminatory, even in sectors such as call centres and airlines.

“I have spent my whole life at work,” mourns one worker with tears in her eyes. “But I am still poor. I can’t pay for my children’s extra-curricula activities.”

There’s a price for development, and these women have paid it.

The film doesn’t make the point, but politicians often argue that “sacrifices” are needed to facilitate development: but the examples in this film do not support that justification. Even cheap product industries could make profits while treating workers better. And somehow the sacrifices are always made by others.