There are countless examples of Korean women organizing and leading labor strikes throughout history, but the Dong-Il Textile Strikes of the 1970s are a great example of how the global expansion of capitalism reinforced systems of patriarchal violence in Korea, and vice versa.

"Korean women radically shaped the direction and outcome of the labor movement and pro-democracy struggles, [yet] scholars tend to concentrate on class formations and class struggles without considering gender politics and women's activism; a systemic neglect" (Jeong-Lim Nam).

Korean women factory workers have always been (and continue to be) at the center of industrial exploitation. Dong-Il Textile maintained a strict sexual division of labor on the shop floor, and "beatings + verbal abuse of women workers by the shop floor male leaders were common."

Despite making up the majority of workers at Dong-Il, women were often hindered from participating in the labor union. "Male laborers and their union leaders were subsumed into divisive tactics endorsed by management" ignoring female laborers who were making less + working more.

At the time, Dong-Il's labor union had also been forced to join the National Textile Worker Union, which was largely supervised + controlled by the state. Everything changed in 1972, when women union laborers voted out the male union leaders and elected the first woman rep.

Dong-Il's managers and production workers found the new union leaders "unacceptable," and a division emerged between "female union members and male anti-unionists" at the factory. These tensions continued through 1976, when management attempted to dissolve the female-led union.

In addition to buying votes and making threats, "pro-management male workers physically assaulted women workers who had come to the union office to vote." Management also nailed the factory dormitory shut and cut off electricity + the water supply to stop residents from voting.

"Roughly 200 indignant female laborers smashed down the nailed doors and initiated a sit-down strike inside the union office, [and] by the second day of the campaign, more than 400 women gathered in the union office." By the third day, fully-armed riot police came to the strike.

Several workers spontaneously decided to take off their clothes and surround the group as riot squads approached, declaring that "men cannot handle naked women, even the police." 72 women were violently arrested, and many had to be hospitalized for injuries and mental trauma.

There is so much more to this story about the labor organizers of Dong-Il Textile, which you can read for free and in English here: https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/korean-women-textile-workers-fight-fair-union-election-1976-1978

Kim Mikyoung discusses even more examples of Korean women workers and their critical role in the 1970's labor movement in her article, "South Korean Women Workers' Labor Resistance in the Era of Export-Oriented Industrialization": https://www.jstor.org/stable/deveandsoci.32.1.77