Building Ships, Building a Nation

Building Ships, Building a Nation examines the rise and fall, during the rule of Park Chung Hee (1961-79), of the combative labor union at the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation (KSEC), which was Korea's largest shipyard until Hyundai appeared on the scene in the early 1970s. Drawing on the union's extraordinary and extensive archive, Hwasook Nam focuses on the perceptions, attitudes, and discourses of the mostly male heavy-industry workers at the shipyard and on the historical and sociopolitical sources of their militancy. Inspired by legacies of labor activism from the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods, KSEC union workers fought for equality, dignity, and a voice for labor as they struggled to secure a living wage that would support families.

The standard view of the South Korean labor movement sees little connection between the immediate postwar era and the period since the 1970s and largely denies positive legacies coming from the period of Japanese colonialism in Korea. Contrary to this conventional view, Nam charts the importance of these historical legacies and argues that the massive mobilization of workers in the postwar years, even though it ended in defeat, had a major impact on the labor movement in the following decades.

Hwasook Nam is assistant professor of history and international studies at the University of Washington, where she holds the James B. Palais professorship in Korea studies.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part One | The Legacies of Colonialism and the Early Cold War Years
1. Worker Militancy in the Postwar Years
2. Anticommunism, Labor Rights, and Organized Labor: The Early 1950s

Part Two | The Emergence of a Democratic Union
3 KSEC Workers in the 1950s
4 The KSEC Union in the Political Upheavals of 1960-61
5 Consolidation of a Democratic Union
6 Rationalization and Resistance

Part Three | Development Over Democracy
7. Development versus Democracy: The Late 1960s
8. Privatization and the Suppression of Labor, 1968-69
9. Shipbuilding Workers under Authoritarian Rule: The 1970s
10. Shipbuilding for the World Market and Resurging Labor Militancy

Appendix A: The KSEC Union Archive Document File List, 1960-79
Appendix B: The Labor Charter of 1948
Appendix C: A Comparison of Two Contracts, 1968 and 1971
Notes
Bibliography
Index