Labor of Protesting: Korean Dock Workers’ Wartime Strike against the US Military

The Busan dock workers’ general strike of 1952 is recorded as one of the largest collective actions during the Korean War (1950-53). Although the wartime conditions were unfavorable to collective bargaining, the strike concluded with partial acceptance of the workers’ major demands by the US military, their de facto employer. Previous scholarship has described this wartime strike as an unexpectedly successful, premature form of labor movement in Korea. My paper seeks to understand the logistics workers’ labor and protest through the lens of the global history of military labor. Formally contracted through Korean intermediary companies, the protesters represent many local civilians who were not granted a full- membership status by the foreign military yet provided essential labor for its overseas operation. At the same time, the able-bodied males hired for the unionized transportation job held a stronger bargaining position against their foreign employer relative to the many others– women, elderly, and children– recruited for informal posts that usually paid less and had fewer labor protections. The dock workers’ social position offers us a case to think about how the US military perceived and mobilized local civilians as a temporary labor force in gendered and racialized terms and, at the same time, when and how such ideas and practices can be challenged.