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The YH Trading Company Ltd was a wig factory founded in 1966 by Jang Yong-ho (after whom it was named), started with only 10 workers and a capital of one million won (about $886 today). In just four years, in 1970, it became a company of 4,000 workers. Benefiting from the boom in demand for wigs and the export-oriented policies of Park’s dictatorial government, the company’s fame and growth was due to the sweat and sacrifices of its female workers, who made up the majority of the company’s workforce (around 90% of the total).

In September of the same year, Jang Yong-ho appointed his brother-in-law Jin Dong-hee as president of YH, as his plans were becoming more and more ambitious - to the detriment, of course, of his own employees.

Three years later, in 1973, Jang Yong-ho stole one billion won (about $885,732) and flew to the United States to inaugurate the company’s American headquarters, leaving the original one in the hands of Jin, whose expertise in running it was little. Indeed, YH saw its debts increase and was forced to reduce the number of female workers, beginning its rapid fall only two years later.

All of this rested on the shoulders of the contract women under the company, who received their wages through a “piecework” contract, meaning they were paid according to the results of their work over a certain number of hours. Under this contract, they could not receive any wages without work done.

After a strike in March 1975 that was suppressed by the police, the women workers found themselves disheartened and desperate, and felt the need to form a union to stop those policemen who insisted that their collective action - considered a crime against the nation and society - violated the National Security Law, threatening and scaring them.

By May 1975, the YH union was finally founded, despite the fact that the company attempted to establish a union dominated by it and continued to disturb the institution of the democratic union, within which the leaders carried out various activities, such as educating other women workers and organizing workshops.

In her diary - in May ‘78 and March ‘79, respectively - 20-year-old trade unionist Kim Kyeong-sook wrote:

“One must fight through discussion. Unity, right, solidarity, struggle, criticism. One must build a labor movement.” “One must not only see it as a movement of speech, one must look at it as a movement of action.”

Already after seven months, the women workers received a 50% bonus, the first result of the YH union’s struggles earned for the first time since the company’s creation.

On this, union President Choi Soon-young said

“We demanded to provide the basic conditions stipulated by the Labor Standards Act (근로기준법 of 1953). We were excited as if we were in heaven even if negotiations at minimum levels were maintained.”

The international economy was restructured and heavy industry began to be worked on in the late 1970s. In the same years, precisely in 1978, as a result of the oil crisis caused by the events that had been happening in the Middle East for years, YH, as well as the entire wig industry, began to retreat, its exports declined and with them the number of workers in the company, which dropped to just 500.

The women workers began a battle demanding the normalization (a complex process whose purpose is to transform the company’s economic result - historical, adjusted, prospective - into a value useful to express the income capacity of the company concerned) of the company, but both YH and the government were uninterested in the workers’ situation and were quick to transfer responsibility to one or the other. The following year the company signed the Declaration of Closure in March, and in August it made the final (unilateral) decision.

The Yusin regime of Park Chung-hee, meanwhile, showed its violence and called for the brutal repression of women workers who were fighting for their rights.

And that was what happened in August 1979.

About 200 women workers occupied the headquarters of the opposition party to the Yusin regime, the “New Democratic Party” (a reference for the South Korean democracy movement), followed by the journalists documenting their strike. Again, police intimidated the strikers with the talk about violation of the law and the workers were asked to disperse immediately, but this did not happen. After 40 hours of strike action, the repression was brutal: in 23 minutes, 1,000 armed police officers pounced on the strikers and anyone who came under their hands, including 30 opposition party members, 12 journalists and dozens of workers. One of them lost her life: 21-year-old Kim Kyeong-sook.

The government covered up the murder using the excuse of suicide, which was only denied in 2008 with an announcement by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

“On the body, there is no sign of arterial cuts, and there is a scar on the back of the hand believed to have been struck with an iron pipe. On the larynx, there is a mortal wound indicating blows caused by sharp objects.”

This crackdown, which has gone down in history as the “YH Incident,” was the spark that ignited the spirits of the South Korean working class, leading to the Busan and Masan popular uprisings, and eventually the collapse of the Yusin regime.

Kim Kyeong-sook’s spirit - along with that of 22-year-old Jeon Tae-il, who died in 1970 after setting himself on fire in protest for workers rights - became the catalyst for the democracy movement of the 1980s, of which it is crucial to remember that in its front there was the working class.

Sources:

Y.H. Incident in South Korea 1979 

Holding a memorial service for Martyr Kim Kyeong-sook