The shipyard stalwart.

• Author: Seol, Kap Su
• Position: SOUTH KOREA - Korean Confederation of Trade Unions' Kim Jin-suk

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AT DAWN ON JANUARY 6, Kim Jin-suk began a sit-in in the control cab of a shipyard crane to protest her employer's plan to shed 400 workers. Amazingly, she stayed there all winter, all spring, all summer, and much of the fall. Her defiance sparked mass protests at her worksite and galvanized the labor movement in South Korea.

Kim, a fifty-two-year-old welder, is a leader of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. Her stand against Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction Company, a shipbuilder in Busan, had huge symbolism. She was occupying the same tiny room where, eight years ago, Kim Ju-ik, the then-leader of her union and her lifelong comrade, ended his 129-day sit-in against 600 job cuts by hanging himself.

After 309 days atop the crane, Kim came down on November 10 once the company agreed to rehire ninety-four laid off workers and pay them $20,000 each.

Kim's supporters and fellow union members knew she would not come down to the ground unless Hanjin reinstated the sacked workers. Kim, whose lifelong commitment to the labor movement is marked by numerous arrests and two jail terms, called her crane-top sit-in "one last fight to win."

Kim's life is a series of high-risk battles.

In 1981, when the twenty-one-year-old Kim went to work at the Korean Shipbuilding Company, she was the only female welder and one of the youngest employees. In her memoir, Salt Flower Trees, she wrote that so many workers died on the job that she had to spend many of her off-hours attending funerals.

"They used to say it took four fatalities to complete a ship," Kim says in an interview with The Progressive over her solar-charged smartphone. Her supervisors often forced her to sign false witness statements after fatal industrial accidents. Kim recalled one such incident. "On a windy winter day, one of my senior welders fell to death," Kim says. "I had to sign a statement saying that he fell because he wore so many layers of clothes that he could not maneuver freely on the scaffolding."

She began her first "fight to win" in 1986 when she and Park Changsu, another welder, organized a refusal to accept the rodent-infested lunchboxes provided by the Korean Shipbuilding Company. This campaign was a success, and it laid the groundwork for an independent union in 1987, though Kim was fired for her organizing efforts.

In 1989, the company was sold to the Hanjin conglomerate, which was infamous for its anti-labor practices. Two years later, her...