Diaspora against Free Trade: Organizing against the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement

In 2006, the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (Kor-US FTA) was slated to become the largest since NAFTA. With a history of US intervention in Korea, especially since the Korean War, Korean laborers recognized this uneven power dynamic all too well. The Kor-US FTA would entrench the neocolonial relationship between South Korea and the United States. Diasporic Koreans were called into action, mobilizing US-based activists to organize with Korean laborers to confront the US’s imperial ambitions through the rhetoric of fee trade and globalization. During the negotiations of the free trade agreement, activists marched through the streets of Washington, DC, performing a funeral procession for the Kor-US FTA and chanting “Down Down FTA.” They not only protested the Kor-US FTA for its adverse impacts on working people in the US and Korea, but they also demonstrated that international free trade agreements were tools of imperial power. Presenting newly-digitized film footage from events, rallies, and demonstrations from the anti-Kor-US FTA struggle, mounted by a coalition of working people, diasporic Koreans, Asian American activists, and a delegation from Korea, this paper argues that labor organizing extends beyond the realm of the shop floor or the workplace. Identifying the impacts of international agreements as conditions for worsening work conditions for laborers, in the United States and South Korea, activists revealed the thoroughfares of global racial capitalism and imperialism.