Whoa! Took some flak from my previous post! A good friend who works with NK policy took offense at me calling Kaesong a "slave labor camp." OK, I was being a sarcastic ass, but I did change my wording to "slave wages camp." Point is, I respect his opinion, but I'm coming at things from a different angle: I think that the low wages aren't too different from what NGO's and people like me already criticize Nike for, and is why people are sneaking cameras into maquiladora in Mexico, and is what American Apparel likes to brag that is doesn't do as part of its corporate persona. In addition to all that, what bothers me is that the running of the complex is in the government-controlled North, and the never-trustworthy business partner, a chaebeol in the South, with its own set of corporate interests. And at $.20 an hour, no collective bargaining rights, nay, no guarantee that any of the contractual stipulations protecting the NK workers are even being met -- I can't with good conscience be happy about this as a sign of the future of North-South relations.
In fact, it reminds me of what I think will be the first thing to happen if a real unification ever happened: North Korean cheap male labor would replace cheap foreign labor, even as North Korean women are used to bridge the marriage gap, in lieu of browner, less desirable Filipina or Vietnamese women. Watch work visas for NK men come into instant existence, right along with quick marriage visas for NK women. Watch as NK men become a new, gendered underclass even as NK women enter the scene as powerless baby machines who have little social support or recourse when it comes to abuse.
Am I a cynic? No, I don't believe so. I would be a starry-eyed optimist with little knowledge of actual social problems both here and in other countries to believe that NK labor and women wouldn't perfectly "solve" and slip right into an existing socio-economic system that already is desperate for cheap labor and easy-to-marry women -- especially when seen against the rubric of the "minjok," however much the official ideology has started to move away from that idea. It's still going to be seen as "better" to have a NK factory worker or NK woman as wife than a "foreigner."
If we're talking about "first steps" into a new world of North-South relations, this is what I see Kaesong as. And have for as long as it's existed. In the end, it's little more than an extremely advantageous situation for North and South corporate interests, as well as a great flag-waving point for the South, which can and does like to represent itself as a generous big brother these days. Because whenever it comes up, I have to listen to how the south is doing OH-SO-MUCH for the North and what a sign it is of how close North and South are becoming.
Simply put, I don't see Kaesong as a harbinger of things to come vis-a-vis North and South Koreas' relations; I see it portending a far more exploitative relationship that will drive how diplomatic and economic relations will go in the case of any form of reunification. Cheap labor and "better" wives for the South is the future I look to. Which is why I'm very down on the Kaesong situation as anything but a practical business deal made up to look like it has some kind of real meaning for the overall nature of North-South relations. As if it's anything much more than an experiment in making more money, rather than an attempt for the North and South to become better friends.
OK -- that's my response to that point from the last post, which wasn't even a big one. But my friend's anger forced me to clarify myself a bit more as to what I was thinking in my bitter and sarcastic swipe at the Kaesong Complex's raison de etré.
Now, on a totally different note...
The entire point of that post wasn't really to talk about whistleblowers and grand solutions to corruption; more to the point, it was about the moral/ethical slides one has to make in order to live deeply within a foreign society for an extensive amount of time.
In order to adapt somewhere, one needs to make concessions, to make compromises. I do it all the time, I have for a long time. But you also learn which of those many things one cannot change, nor can be found acceptable.
For me, the "second-hand smoke" of injustice cannot be avoided sometimes, so I wonder what it mean to sit idly by while another teacher beats a child, to sit fat and comfortable while espousing opinions about millions of starving North Koreans or even to get the Nobel Pri, to sit by and watch one's corporate masters cynically bilk the government and society out of millions, to be faced with the choice of doing nothing and tacitly participate in corruption while the school pumps up the GPA's of richer students, or even for participating in the very same system and subject that chews many students up and spits them out.
For me, it's about my struggle with many of these issues, and not so much about public, Jerry Springer moralizing, but about choosing not to be sucked onto a slippery slope, into a black hole, or into the bedroom of a bear. Because you should really have a sense of why it's a bad idea to fuck bears. 'Cause in the end, you gonna lose a chunk of yourself. Literally!
