Migrants Reimagining the Political: Transnational Activism Against the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement - Jacquelyn Kim

For the visual component of this project, I chose to create a collage on the back of a postcard I purchased in Korea that features a historic map of the whole Korean peninsula, prior to the peninsula’s division into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK). On the bottom of the collage is the banner image of the Korean Women Peasant’s Alliance, and in the middle of the collage is a photograph taken at a protest in Seoul in March 2009. The text written on the brown paper is from the announcement of the formation of KoA’s Women’s Committee, and the quote translates to the following: “At home, at work, and on the streets, we will fight in solidarity with the people to protect our future from the disasters of the Kor-US FTA, as one of the people in the name of women.”¹¹ The flower in the center is a hibiscus, a traditional symbol of Korea associated with hardiness, resilience, and Korean independence. The cow set against an image of flames represents the contention over U.S. beef imports during the FTA negotiations.

Summary

I have chosen to examine an example of transnational solidarity and activism through exploring the 2006-07 movement co-organized by Koreans living on the Korean peninsula together with diasporic Koreans in the U.S. against the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement. The Kor-US FTA, like other free trade agreements, significantly reduces “barriers” to trade such as tariffs and quotas. After its ratification, the Kor-US FTA became the largest FTA negotiated by the United States since NAFTA in 1993.¹ KAWAN (Korean Americans Against War and Liberalism) — a coalition of progressive U.S.-based Korean organizations endorsed by close to 100 immigrant, people of color, LGBT, farmers’, workers’, women’s, national liberation, anti-war and anti-globalization groups from around the country — was a crucial leader in the transnational movement against the Kor-US FTA. A vast majority of the information included in this summary comes from a blog kept by KAWAN members from 2006-07 through which they documented their organizing activities, and I have also drawn from various articles written in Korean and/or English produced for Korean and/or American audiences.

In the two years leading up to the initial signing of the Kor-US FTA, the Korean Alliance against the Kor-US FTA (KoA) — a coalition of approximately 300 groups based in South Korea— and KAWAN engaged in transnational activism, coordinating actions and traveling between the two countries to stage protests and demonstrations on key negotiation dates as the negotiations alternated between taking place in various cities across the U.S. and in Seoul. In various statements published from 2006-7, KAWAN and KoA collectively emphasized the disastrous impacts of the FTA if it were to be implemented, asserting that NAFTA was an immense failure and the Kor-US FTA would similarly result in the loss of livelihoods for farmers and workers, exploitative labor agreements, deteriorating working conditions, dependency on subsidized foreign crops, and environmental degradation.

Negotiations for the Kor-US FTA began on June 5, 2006, and KAWAN, in coordination with a coalition of U.S.-based organizations under the umbrella of Mobilize and Organize to Resist the FTA and Neoliberal Globalization (MORFNG), organized a week-long protest during the week of June 4-9, 2006. Similar multi-day protests took place during each round of negotiation, and the protestors organized various actions — including marches, candlelight vigils, hunger strikes, conferences, workshops, and sit-ins. One of the largest actions co-organized by KAWAN and KoA was a 36-hour global strike in March 2007 in protest of the Kor-US FTA and the “Bush Free Trade Agenda,” as the U.S. was concurrently negotiating FTAs with several other countries at the time, including Peru, Colombia, Panama, and Thailand. Both Korean and U.S. protestors faced violence from police during their actions, with the South Korean government going so far as to enforce a ban on all FTA protests beginning in November 2006 in an attempt to quell anti-FTA sentiments, though the protestors continued to organize.²

Women played a critical role in mobilizing support against the FTA, as evinced by the hosting of multiple events highlighting the gendered impact of the FTA and the active participation of dozens of organizations by and for women. In fact, KoA had a separate Women’s Committee, the formation of which was announced on June 7, 2006. The Committee incorporated members from 15 women’s organizations — including the Korean Women's Associations United (한국여성단체연합), the Korean Women Peasants Alliance (전국여성농민회총연합), Anti-American Women's Association (반미여성회), the Korean Women’s Trade Union (전국여성노동조합), and the Women’s Committee of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (민주노총여성위원회).³ Additionally, KoA’s Women’s Committee organized a National Women’s Conference Against the Kor-US FTA in Seattle on September 1, 2006 to protest the third round of negotiations for the Agreement, and the Committee also hosted the “International Conference of Women Against FTAs” in Seoul in November 2006.⁴

The Kor-US FTA was first signed in June 2007 and later ratified by the respective governments of the U.S. and South Korea in the fall of 2011 after the re-negotiation of various terms of the agreement that resulted in the United States coercing Korea into resuming the import of American beef in exchange for excluding rice from the FTA. Protests continued in Korea throughout the period of 2007-2011, but I was unable to find archival evidence of continued coordinated actions in the U.S. Although the immediate goal of the campaign was unsuccessful, as the Kor-US FTA was indeed ultimately implemented, KAWAN coordinated an Anti-FTA signing ceremony on the day on which the Agreement was signed. The collective statement signed by community members affirmed their commitment to “strengthen our struggle to defeat the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and all NAFTA-style free trade” and to “redouble our efforts to build a just, inclusive, and sustainable world, where people and environment come first before profits.”⁵

 Analysis

 The Kor-US FTA is a continuation of the violence of American imperialism and hegemony, and it is critical to understand the FTA and the protests surrounding its ratification within a larger history of neoliberal policies being implemented on the Korean peninsula. In the aftermath of the Korean War that resulted in the arbitrary division of the Korean peninsula and the continued occupation of the peninsula with U.S. military forces and weapons, the part of the peninsula that is now known as South Korea evolved into a capitalist society susceptible to the intervention of Western neoliberal powers, as evinced by the IMF bailout of 1997. South Korea’s signing of the FTA with the U.S. in 2007 was the first step towards FTAs with many other Western and Western-aligned countries as well. The signing of a FTA with Israel just yesterday, on May 12, 2021 — as Israel continues to displace and engage in the colonial genocide against and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, to steal Palestinian homes (this week, in Sheikh Jarrah), and to attack holy sites — perhaps best evinces the violent trajectory on which the signing of the Kor-US FTA set South Korea.

 Those protesting the Kor-US FTA did and have continued to explicitly situate their activism within a larger global context of imperialism and neoliberalism. As stated by a co-chair of the Korean Alliance against the Kor-US FTA on June 4, 2006 at a rally in front of the White House, “We came to build international solidarity for anti-neoliberalism with Korean Americans, American workers and workers and farmers of the world progressive movement.”⁶ The same co-chair defined neoliberalism as “another name for the unlimited freedom by which transnational capitals and their tool, military power, pursue endless greed and indiscriminate aggression and exploitation.”⁷ In recognition of the importance of military power as a mechanism of neoliberalism, KAWAN linked the fight against the Kor-US FTA to the U.S. military’s presence on the Korean peninsula, as evinced by their organizing of a trip in November 2006 for a delegation from the U.S. to travel to South Korea to protest not only the FTA but also the expansion of Camp Humphreys — the U.S. Army's largest overseas installation, located in Pyeongtaek, South Korea.⁸ KAWAN and KoA also expanded their analysis of the disastrous impact of the Kor-US FTA to encompass environmental degradation: they asserted that “[w]orking-class communities, communities of color and indigenous peoples have suffered the brunt of this attack [of free trade agreements], with the loss of good jobs, poisoning of our environment, and privatization of land and public services.” Thus, KAWAN and KoA grounded their activism in nuanced, globally-focused analyses and situated themselves within historical and contemporary arcs of resistance against U.S. hegemony and empire.

Although the movement against the Kor-US FTA was neither primarily led by nor focused on demands unique to migrant women, migrant women played key roles in the facilitation and actualization of transnational activism and had an immense personal stake in the movement and its goals. The existence and active involvement of various organizations led by and dedicated to women workers and farmers — particularly KoA’s Women’s Committee — evinces the fact that these interlocutors understood the violence of neoliberalism and imperialism as having a specifically gendered impact. In their announcement of the Women’s Committee’s formation, KoA asserted that Korean women were “the biggest victims of absolute poverty, social polarization and discrimination,” and that, if the Kor-US FTA were passed, women workers (who already comprise the majority of temporary/non-regular workers) would be forced to work for lower wages and women farmers would continue to be forced to abandoned their farms to find other jobs that are often temporary and pay low wages.⁹ The transnational support provided by diasporic Koreans living in the U.S. acting in solidarity was critical to generating national and international attention for the protests of the Korean workers and farmers whose livelihoods would be most impacted by the implementation of the FTA. Furthermore, KAWAN and KoA were sensitive to the plights of those who had already become migrant workers due to the increasing corporate globalization of South Korea, and they asserted that the Kor-US FTA would “create more migrant workers” as people would be “forced to leave their homes and face discrimination in other countries.”¹⁰ KAWAN and KoA thus actively worked to equip and empower women with the platform and tools necessary to speak on their experiences as women workers and farmers and to develop complex analyses of the lived experiences of themselves and their families.

 Endnotes

¹ “South Korea — Trade Agreements,” International Trade Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, www.trade.gov/knowledge-product/korea-trade-agreements.
² “Korean Americans for Fair Trade: Statement in Protest of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement,” KAWAN (blog), Blogspot, April 3, 2007, kawanlist.blogspot.com/2007/04/korean-americans-for-fair-trade.html.
³ “한미FTA 저지를위한 여성대책위' 발족 기자회견 개최” [“Press Conference for the Launch of the Women’s Committee of the Korean Alliance against the Kor-US FTA”], 한국여성단체연합 [Korean Women's Associations United], June 9, 2006, women21.or.kr/peace/4677.
⁴ Hyunjung Lee, “여성, 한미FTA 3차협상 총력저지 다짐” [“Women pledge to halt third round of Korea-U.S. free trade talks”], 통일뉴스 [Tongil News], September 1, 2006, www.tongilnews.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=67575; “국제토론회FTA에 반대하는 여성들” [“International Conference of Women Against FTAs”], 한국노동조합총연맹 [Federation of Korean Trade Unions], November 15,v2006, inochong.org/storehouse/7986?ckattempt=2.
⁵ “Anti-FTA Signing Ceremony,” KAWAN (blog), Blogspot, June 30, 2007, kawanlist.blogspot.com/2007/06/anti-fta-signing-ceremony.html.
⁶ Jongryul Oh, “‘Unite all workers against neoliberalism!’” Workers World, June 8, 2006, www.workers.org/2006/world/oh-jongryul-0615/.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ “November Delegation to South Korea.” KAWAN (blog). Blogspot. November 17, 2006. kawanlist.blogspot.com/2006/11/november-delegation-to-south-korea.html.
⁹ “Press Conference for the Launch of the Women's Committee of the Korean Alliance against the Kor-US FTA.”
¹⁰ “Down with the U.S.-South Korea FTA,” KAWAN (blog), Blogspot, May 20, 2006, kawanlist.blogspot.com/2006/05/down-with-u.html.

¹¹ “Press Conference for the Launch of the Women’s Committee of the Korean Alliance against the Kor-US FTA.”

Bibliography

 “Anti-FTA Signing Ceremony.” KAWAN (blog). Blogspot. June 30, 2007. kawanlist.blogspot.com/2007/06/anti-fta-signing-ceremony.html.

 “Down with the U.S.-South Korea FTA.” KAWAN (blog). Blogspot. May 20, 2006. kawanlist.blogspot.com/2006/05/down-with-u.html.

 “국제토론회FTA에 반대하는 여성들” [“International Conference of Women Against FTAs”]. 한국노동조합총연맹 [Federation of Korean Trade Unions], November 15, 2006, inochong.org/storehouse/7986?ckattempt=2.

 “Korean Americans for Fair Trade: Statement in Protest of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement.” KAWAN (blog). Blogspot. April 3, 2007. kawanlist.blogspot.com/2007/04/korean-americans-for-fair-trade.html.

 Lee, Hyunjung. “여성, 한미FTA 3차협상 총력저지 다짐” [“Women pledge to halt third round of Korea-U.S. free trade talks”]. 통일뉴스 [Tongil News], September 1, 2006, www.tongilnews.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=67575.

 “November Delegation to South Korea.” KAWAN (blog). Blogspot. November 17, 2006. kawanlist.blogspot.com/2006/11/november-delegation-to-south-korea.html.

 Oh, Jongryul. “‘Unite all workers against neoliberalism!’” Workers World, June 8, 2006, www.workers.org/2006/world/oh-jongryul-0615/. “‘한미FTA 저지를위한 여성대책위’ 발족 기자회견 개최” [“Press Conference for the Launch of the Women’s Committee of the Korean Alliance against the Kor-US FTA”]. 한국여성단체연합 [Korean Women's Associations United], June 9, 2006, women21.or.kr/peace/4677.

 “South Korea — Trade Agreements.” International Trade Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, www.trade.gov/knowledge-product/korea-trade-agreements.

 “5월19일, "한미FTA 와 여성" 워크샵 개최!” [“Workshop on the Relationship between the Kor-US FTA and Women Held on May 19”]. 전국여성농민회총연합 [Korean Women Peasants Alliance], May 23, 2006, www.kwpa.org/tech/board.php?board=new&page=83&sort=hit&command=body&no=413.