STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!
This WAS available on Netflix, but now it is just…online. Approximately 104 minutes.
The Customer is King. Service for the Customer’s Satisfaction. If the company survives, we survive. We love the customers. This is the motto of theMart.
Supervisor Choi calls the supermarket employees together for an announcement. He calls for Han Sun-hee to the front and praises her hard work, for having never been deducted a point over her five years working there. As a reward, she will become an official staff in three months. The other temporary employees, he says, should follow her example. He then has her lead the company slogan. After that, the employees go to their workstations. I should note right now that the temporary employees comprises a small group of older custodians and a couple dozen younger cashiers, all of whom are women.
Sun-hee’s workstation is at a checkout counter. She welcomes customers with a smile, scans their items with a smile, and takes them money with a smile. Not everyone is as effective as she is. They either do not smile or experience minor setbacks that irritate the customers.
The young Kim Mi-Jin is one such employee, who has to mask her humiliation of having a university classmate as a customer, though that does somewhat help to protect her from the wrath her classmate’s mother, who was about to hold up the line to argue over a membership card. Still, Supervisor Choi has seen what happened and is not impressed.
Sun-Hee and Lee Hye-Mi are about to go on their breaks, when Choi stops them to ask to help out in the back, since the part-time workers were not able to come. Hye-Mi says that she has something that she has to do and hurries off before Choi can protest further, but Sun-Hee meekly follows him.
Sun-Hee still makes it home to…sort of have lunch with her teenage son, Tae-Young and young daughter, Min-Young. She tells Tae-Young that she will buy a new cellphone for him once she becomes official staff. Min-Young wants one too. Sun-Hee tells her to wait until she starts elementary school, but agrees to get her a compass.
Tae-Young’s card is declined, prohibiting him from getting school lunch. He runs off to a private corner of the school and calls Sun-Hee to complain, but that will not get him lunch. A classmate finds him; a somewhat outspoken poor kid who also has to make do with a flip phone. She claims that the rich kids do not pay for lunch either, but manage to eat well. She throws a bag of food at him and tells him to just take the food even if the machine rejects his card.
In a not-so-subtle parallel, Hye-Mi is meekly trying to enforce the sticker rule at the checkout counter, and the customer acts offended at being called a thief. Choi has Sun-Hee take over at the counter so that he can scold Hye-Mi in private. Sun-Hee also has to deal with a refund problem, which causes her to end her shift late. In the women’s locker room, Hye-Mi asks her if she is tired. Sun-Hee is, but it is all for the supermarket. Well, Hye-Mi is tired.
Choi enters the women’s locker room, startling most of the women inside. He says that everyone must go outside except for Hye-Mi, who has to properly apologize to the customer, her son, and her daughter-in-law. The customer says that Hye-Mi should kneel when apologizing, which she does. Due to this humiliating exchange (which Sun-Hee secretly witnessed), Hye-Mi was late in picking up her young son from school, so he had to wait outside alone.
Five higher-ups at the supermarket, all middle-aged men, are sitting at the meeting room table talking about reducing staff to make up for stalled progress. Manager Kang Dong-Joon, who had been standing at the side of the room, tries to speak up, saying that society and the law might look upon this negatively, but the men at the table shut him down. The temporary employees are to be laid off regardless of the length of their contracts and the culling must happen within a month.
The list gets posted and the temporary workers crowd around it. Choi tells them all to return to work, despite their imminent firing. Sun-Hee sees Dong-Joon and runs to him, asking about her promised promotion to official employee. He meekly says that there is nothing that he can do. Hye-Mi tells Choi that this is a violation of the company’s contract and other workers agree. Choi responds by threatening to fire them all right now instead of in a month and has his human sheepdog Lee Joon-hee get the women to their workstations.
As Sun-Hee stares at her dinner, Min-Young is talking to Tae-Young about his upcoming high school field trip. The students get to choose the location, but they need parental consent form. If he does not take part, he will be considered absent. Tae-Young asks Sun-Hee about it, but she does not respond.
The temporary workers meet in secret at a restaurant to discuss their grievances and their options. Sun-Hee arrives late, having once again been made to work beyond her shift. First, they state that they are in the right for following the contract. Hye-Mi says that it is not enough for them to complain; they have to establish a union. She and Kang Soon-Rye, one of the cleaning crew (and Dong-Joon’s aunt), hand out copies of the union membership application form. Someone asks whether the company will agree to discuss this matter, even if they do form a union. Hye-Mi says that it is against the law to refuse. Mi-Jin is the only one who refuses to sign, saying that she was planning to quit anyways.
It is proposed that Hye-Mi and Soon-Rye act as representatives for the cashiers and cleaners, but Hye-Mi argues that two is not enough. Soon-Rye asks Sun-Hee to act as a third representative. Having already hesitated before signing the application, Sun-Hee balks, saying that she has no experience with this. Soon-Rye counters that none of them do, and that she could just be there as support. The other workers agree that Sun-Hee, who has had five years without losing a point, would be a great representative.
Soon-Rye, Hye-Mi, and Sun-Hee hold a meeting with management…who do not come. Well, Dong-Joon tried to get his boss to meet with them, but it did not happen. Instead, the three women sit in the meeting room with the lights off for an interminable amount of time.
After getting rejected from her prospected job, Mi-Jin hands in her union application form, but points out that the bosses had never listened to employee complaints in the past and will not do so now. While complaints in the previous meeting concerned working during breaks and overtime without pay, Mi-Jin notes that the locker room is barely separated from the heater room, the ventilation, is not working, and only one or two fans are available during the summer. So what is the point of all this? Hye-Min responds by proposing a strike.
Meanwhile, the heads are putting pressure on the boss to resolve all of this, so he gets Choi to try to convince Sun-Hee to break up the union by promising her the official staff position that she had already been promised.
While handing out Union member shirts in the locker room, however, Hye-Mi tells the others that Choi had made the same offer to her. Mi-Jin and Soon-Rye say that this is a sign that management is getting anxious. Hye-Mi announces that they will come to work the next day and treat it like any other working day until 4:00 PM, at which point, they go on strike. Sun-Hee, who arrived late once again due to working beyond her shift time, has notably stayed away from the conversation and has not picked out a shirt. Hye-Mi notices and hands her one after the others have left.
The afternoon arrives. Soon-Rye is the first to casually take off her uniform shirt to reveal the Union shirt and walk away from her cart. Others quietly follow suit. The cashiers close their stations and start walking away. They are nervous. One apologizes to the confused customers. The temporary workers who were not on shift at the time and had been waiting outside quickly walk in to greet the ones already inside. Forty of them ready to make themselves heard.
Only Sun-Hee is left, walking down a hallway in the back, overhearing the boss complaining to Choi, who sneaks in a group of scab workers. He tells them to stay at the cash registers, even if it means getting into physical confrontation with the strikers. Sun-Hee runs.
Hye-Mi is trying to discuss the situation with a customer who is annoyed that people like her have to be affected by some internal spat between the workers and their bosses. Hye-Mi is in the middle of apologizing for the inconvenience when Sun-Hee runs into her to warn her about the part-timers. But it is too late: they are already running to the checkout counters and a few have already made it. Hye-Mi yells that replacing the temporary workers with part-time workers is illegal. The strikers run at the scabs, but since neither side wants to be seen as instigating a fight, the confrontations are basically shoving matches, with only Choi hitting the scabs to prevent them from retreating. The front of the supermarket descends into chaos as the remaining customers try to flee. The strikers manage to gain control of the checkout lines and stand in front of them. Choi reluctantly leads the part-times to the back. The strikers cheer and hug as Choi and the part-timers retreat. They have taken over the supermarket and have won the first battle. But it is only the first battle.
Many South Korean movies that make it big in the national box office are based, at least loosely, on true stories, especially those that involve class struggles or the crimes of the wealthy. This one is inspired primarily, though not solely, by the strike by E-Land Group retail workers. A law which would require companies to grant non-regular employees regular status after working there for two years were supposed to go into effect on the first of July, 2007. Right before that, E-Land Group retailers Homever and New Core laid off over 900 non-regular female cashiers and outsourced their jobs. Negotiations between the E-Land union and the management broke down on the 10th, the sit-in began on the 11th, and the entire ordeal lasted for nearly a year and a half. This movie leaves the timeframe a little loose and reduces the scale to one particular store, in order to focus on a few core characters. And, of course, to provide the dramatic content necessary for every effective South Korean movie. I would say that this movie is a very good example of a movie turning a big story about masses rising and making it a smaller personal one.
There may be some fudging of other facts. Were the E-Land temporary workers not unionized earlier? I am not sure, but there had been a union that was formed in 1993, a 57-day walk off in 1997, and a265-day strike in 2000. During that strike, the founder and chairman of E-Land was traveling out of the country, conveniently beyond the Ministry of Labor’s reach, which had a warrant out for his arrest. He was also out of the country during this strike. Perhaps Soon-Rye, who had worked for theMart for twenty years, would have witnessed some of this, but she would also know that management had no respect for the union.
Indeed, this movie is not trying to be some kind of radical polemic against an unjust system, but an attempt to view a major recent (5-7 years ago) event through a supportive and sympathetic eye. 900 is a daunting number of people, but forty is much more manageable, especially if one focuses on four or five. And it is easier to humanize them, to show them as relatable on top of maybe being archetypes. That the motivation for two of the main characters for going on strike are directly related to their being mothers (though through different paths) was probably deliberate, as was framing their economic situation and society in general that was getting in the way of them being the mothers that they wanted to be.
Sun-Hee is a mother trying to make ends meet for herself and her children while her husband is…away…gleefully acting as a cog in the system and wary of rocking the boat even after the system betrays her. Hye-Mi may be slightly younger, but her past has broken her view of company loyalty, especially when it comes to family. Soon-Rye is of an age that should automatically bestow upon her respect in Confucian society, but the best that she gets is condescension. Mi-Jin graduated college with so much promise, and 50 job rejections. Dong-Joon may be the least realized character, but he still gets a bit of a storyline as the one who is unsure of what to do with what little authority that he has. Even the surly Tae-Young has a bit of an arc as he ever-so-slowly starts to comes to terms with what his mother is going through, as opposed to simply worrying about how her antics affect him.
The scaling down of the event and the focus on a few somewhat accessible characters makes it less of a didactic framing of recent events and more of a personal retelling. So, when the company skirts its own violations of the law and is able to send cops and other thugs to violently try to force the workers off of the store property, the outrage is not just over something abstract. When the company tries to use low-key psychological warfare against individuals within the movement, it is easier to understand why they would waver, even when they know that they are being manipulated. And when the media and general populace appear to display willful ignorance, apathy, and antipathy to their needs, the focus remains on the effect on the strikers. The pressures that they face are more immediate. Their uncertainties over their actions, their fears over their safety net, are more obvious. It shows them as not mere pawns of recent history, but people. The politics should already be apparent from the first scene to the final shot; this movie adds to the manifesto a story about dreams, desire, despair, and the dignity that humans deserve, but can often be denied.
I wish that this movie were still on Netflix, but big corporations will do what they want. You can find it…online…if you know where to look. Regardless, I recommend it.
WTF ASIA 87: Pratidwandi (India: 1970, approx. 105 minutes)
Available online.
WTF ASIA 88: Outrage (Japan: 2010, approx. 109 minutes)
Available in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States (also Amazon), and maybe some other countries.
You must be logged in to post a comment.