CINA

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Two days ago(1.28) the spokeswoman of the Jaeneung Struggle Collective released the following statement:
 

I and my fellow fighters have waged a battle against the Jaeneung Education Institute for the last 1,500 days, and it still doesn’t end. Each and every one of us has been put through indescribable daily hell; we did not rest a single day for the past 100 days. Nonetheless we brace for another chapter of the ongoing struggle.

A while ago, I found a middle-aged man weeping before our camp at dawn. I was surprised to see the man because he was a stranger to the camp. It turned out that he was a member of the labor union at Hanjin Heavy Industries & Construction, which recently won a victory in a seemingly impossible situation; the union members were promised to be rehired a year later. This miracle-like triumph planted a hope among people. In all those years, we could not even make a tent before the headquarters of Jaeneung at freezing nights. I and my fellow warriors spent countless nights in a cold vehicle. But we were not alone; some intoxicated people came by and, in a rising fury, knocked heavily on the door of Jaeneung Education Institute or knocked down flowerpots nearby.

You might wonder: "Why are you on the street everyday like a reminder of sadness and sorrow?"

The teachers who continue to work for Jaeneung and visit homes of their students could have forgotten us. Those who know us might want to forget us. About 3,800 teachers banded together when teachers at Jaeneung first established a labor union. But not all the original members sticked together in raising our voice over the past 12 years -- they stayed with us for less than a quarter of that time. For the remaining 8+ years, those who stayed fought alone on the streets with tooth and nail against the behemoth in the private education industry. Many of our fellow members were hounded, scathed, hurt and crushed and in the end left the struggle in a defeated spirit.

Yet, we remained and continue to fight on the street.

We demanded that the company rehires all the 12 laid-off workers, but they refused to rehire one member of us.
Ms. Lee Ji-hyeon was one of our former warriors. She was one of the workers who set up a labor union in 1999 and has been with us in this struggle for years and years. But she developed cancer during our collective struggle. We could hardly afford to visit her lying in a sick bed; we silently wept when we heard that her health is rapidlly declining and failing her. We wept again on the day she passed away.

We are a small group of people who number slightly over ten, yet we choose to confront the gigantic force who has constantly oppressed their workers. Amidst our bleeding, we sometimes direct our fury against each other, but nonetheless we keep planning our daily battle.

You might ask: "Why do you keep fighting?"

 
We demand two things:
1) Jaeneung acknowledges and permits our labor union, which Jaeneung deprived from us solely because we chose to fight
2) Jaeneung rehires all laid-off workers

Each warrior has his or her own reason to continuously participate in Sit-in Struggle.
One fighter wants to bring back the wonderful time of 33 days in  and around December 1999. It was a time when "Labor Union of Educational Workers at Jaeneung: Our Shared Love and Dream" was founded, which kindled hope and brought smiles to faces of teachers as they worked at homes of their young learners.
Another member simply wishes to leave behind ten years of being unemployed and join the flow of people who go to work.
Another warrior aspires to rebuild the disbanded labor union. Another one of us seeks revenge against the corporation that wielded its vast capital to destroy his life.
And there's a warrior who wants to go back to co-workers who have trusted their darling students and him and stayed together through thick and thin.

 
We want to rejoin a Jaeneung that acknowledges labor union, a company where diligent educational workers are not forced to "pay for" the loss of client students out of their salary as punishment. We yearn to return Jaeneung as a proud teacher who specializes in private home-tutoring, instead of being relegated into a second-class teacher. We refuse to be sacrificed as a scapegoat just to bolster monstrous growth of the corporation. That is why we refuse to accept neither phase-in reinstatement nor selective reinstatement, which Jaeneung thinks are "generous" offers.

 
We have no idea how long our sit-in struggle will go on. We only ask for this: the right existence of our labor union! But the dinosaur of capital and power is freaked out and says it can't give us any.

We wish to record our story with a happy ending that imbues every heart with hope; "The last twelve fighters, who confronted the ugly force who never stopped exploiting laborers and taking away things that made them workers, finally made a breakthrough and lived happily ever after."

(Translation by Kim Sun-ah)

Here you can read the original text in Korean!