Struggling for the right to struggle: Cultural workers’ labour rights and unions

Abstract

This paper explores how writers in the South Korean broadcasting industry have collectively struggled against their precarious working conditions and faced distinctive difficulties in taking their collective actions, including unionization. Based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 23 research participants, this paper examines why and how these South Korean writers have established various forms of collective worker organization: from a professional association to informal grassroots communities, to a women-only trade union, to two unions of media workers who are freelance or on contract. I argue that the activism of these writers reflects the intersection of different identities, ranging from women to freelancers to cultural workers and that their activism promotes the idea that working creatively, autonomously and equitably should be recognized as a basic labour right.

Labour issues were famously referred to in the early 2000s as ‘a blind spot’ in communication and media studies (Mosco and McKercher, 2008: vii). Since then, however, scholars have paid closer attention to labour in these industries (Banks, 2007; Gill, 2002; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Kim, 2014a; McRobbie, 2016; Ross, 2008, 2009). These scholars have shown that the working conditions for many in these industries have fallen short of claims made in celebratory discourses around so-called creative labour (Florida, 2012), highlighting unpaid and underpaid work, diminished social benefits, overwork and insecure employment. In particular, much of this research has underscored how employment in these industries is often organized as freelance work, through self-employment and on temporary contracts.

Not surprisingly, cultural workers have collectively struggled to improve their working conditions. Specifically, communication and media scholars have reported the efforts of cultural workers, including freelance screenwriters, towards the goal of establishing unions and/or other forms of collective organization in South Korea (hereafter Korea; Choi, 2019; Kim, 2019), as well as Europe and North America (Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2016; Cohen, 2016; De Peuter, 2014b). However, there is a dearth of research (Banks, 2015; Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2016; Choi, 2019) on the distinctive difficulties encountered by these workers after their organizations have been formed – difficulties that might distinguish such efforts and organizations from more well-established and longstanding mainstream trade unions. In fact, mainstream trade unions have been historically tied to the situation of male industrial workers, who in many countries are mostly full-time employees in highly structured workplaces (Mosco and McKercher, 2008). Mainstream Korean unionism has the same model (Hong, 2017).

To extend the scope of research on the labour activism of culture workers, this paper explores the distinctiveness of cultural workers’ labour activism and unionization in media and communication industries and the particular difficulties workers face in their activism. Specifically, this paper examines how writers in the Korean broadcasting industry have collectively struggled against their precarious working conditions and faced distinctive difficulties in their collective actions, including unionization. These writers, who work to produce content for all genres in the industry, are often called ‘broadcasting writers’ (pangsong chakka) in Korea. ¹ The case of Korean broadcasting writers particularly highlights the struggle of cultural workers because most of these writers are freelancers, which legally refers to self-employed workers in Korea, who labour under conditions of structurally normalized precarity (Kim, 2007). In addition, these writers have established several different forms of organization: from a professional association to informal grassroots communities, to a women-only trade union, to two unions of media workers in non-standard employment. This paper documents how these writers have developed and participated in these five collective organizations and the difficulties their organizations faced.

Based on my analysis of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 23 research participants, this research reveals that before even being able to make basic demands for higher pay and job security, these writers have had to struggle for the very right to resist unfair working conditions as cultural workers. Since writers work as freelancers, they have faced obstacles to achieving labourers’ rights, including bargaining rights. For example, writers have often struggled for recognition as employees or, more broadly, as labourers in the Korean legal system, a status allowing the opportunity to bargain collectively with broadcasters. This article also shows that, while each organization has its own unique focus, these Korean writers’ collective subjectivity and labour activism reflect the intersection of different identities – ranging from women to freelancers to cultural workers – based on their gender, precarious employment status and occupation. Finally, I argue that their labour activism has promoted the idea that working creatively, autonomously and without inequities should be recognized as basic labour rights.

This article begins with a literature review covering discussions of labour activism in cultural industries. After that, I briefly introduce writers’ collective organizations, my specific research questions and the method used in this study. Finally, I disclose how Korean writers have established new organizations and faced multiple challenges in their collective actions, and what they have asked for as part of their labour rights.

Cultural workers and labour unions

Workers can collectively struggle against the problematic aspects of their precarious working conditions through collective actions and bargaining. However, as several scholars have pointed out, there are fewer unions for cultural workers compared to those for traditional industrial workers, such as full-time workers in the manufacturing industry (De Peuter, 2014a; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Kim, 2019; McRobbie, 2016). Specifically, Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) describe that cultural workers in the United Kingdom’s media industries were generally discouraged from joining unions because they felt uncertain whether trade unions would benefit them. These scholars also report that these cultural workers were anxious about whether they would lose their jobs due to participation in unions. Focussing on distinctive characteristics of cultural work, McRobbie (2016: 36) has noted that, for cultural workers, work is a process of self-actualization, and workers want to gain ‘happiness at work’ through their labour. She argues that the ‘pleasure in work’ ideology in association with cultural work has acted against efforts to organize workers and played a significant role in diminishing the sense that trade unions and organized labour are necessary (McRobbie, 2016: 36). According to McRobbie (2016: 73–74), this ideology ‘is an important counter to the Marxist idea of ‘alienation’; this new kind of workforce will have no reason to find common cause in the monotony or boredom of labour.’

In contrast to McRobbie (2016), who stresses the subjectivity and ethos of cultural workers, Ross (2008, 2009) emphasizes that the precarious working conditions of cultural workers mainly stem from ‘non-standard employment,’ such as self-employment. De Peuter (2014a: 269–270) highlights that while some cultural workers in non-standard employment status have encountered difficulty, they have responded collectively to their precarious working conditions through ‘non-standard aggregations,’ including ‘atypical workers’ associations, coworking spaces and intern initiatives’ in contrast to mainstream trade unions.

In terms of occupational identity and membership, scholars have found that collective work organizations, including unions for cultural workers, often have distinctive characteristics (Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2016; Choi, 2019). Specifically, Banks and Hesmondhalgh (2016) find that as cultural workers tend to have dual identities of professionals and labourers, their organizations have dual characteristics. For example, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) in the United States sometimes focusses ‘more on championing the artistry of the profession’ but also acts as a union that centres more ‘on working conditions’ (Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2016: 273). In terms of non-commercial art sectors, Choi (2019) has pointed out two challenges surrounding the unionization of cultural workers. First, due to their self-employment status, art and cultural workers have been uncertain whether they can be defined as labourers who can demand labour rights. Second, cultural workers tend not to consider cultural production as labour: art and cultural workers in non-commercial art sectors often aim to resist the commercialization of their cultural products or performances by refusing work that profits specific employers (Choi, 2019). Interestingly, Choi (2019) reports how the subjectivity of cultural workers as labourers is developed and reshaped through their labour activism as exemplified by the Solidarity of Culture and Art Workers (SCAW, Munhwa yesul nodong yŏndae) in Korea, a union for art and cultural workers in areas such as live performance, publishing and music. Choi (2019: 163) shows that in establishing the union and performing collective actions, SCAW activists defined their work as ‘art as labour’ that creates value for society, not for specific employers based on employment relations.

While this paper focusses particularly on the labour activism of cultural workers, it is necessary to point out characteristics of Korean mainstream and alternative unionism before zeroing in on writers’ labour activism. Korean mainstream trade unions have been based on enterprise unionism (kiŏppyŏl nojo), a type of unionism that organizes all occupations of a specific company and manages collective bargaining at the company level (Kim, 2005). Korean enterprise unions have granted membership only to workers in standard employment relationships, such as workers with permanent, full-time employment contracts (Kim, 2005). In contrast with enterprise unionism, industrial unionism in Korea refers to ‘a form of unionism where industry-wide unions directly participate in multi-employer collective bargaining at the industry level’ (Lim, 2019: 168). Korean union activists have endeavoured to affiliate many enterprise unions with industrial unions, but enterprise unions still engage in bargaining at the company level (Lee, 2018).

Moreover, the unionization rate of workers tends to be higher among male than female workers, workers in standard rather than non-standard employment, workers at large companies rather than small-scale companies and workers in manufacturing rather than non-manufacturing industries such as services (Hong, 2017). Korean scholars see lower unionization rates in specific groups of workers when the groups fail to find unions that support them and allow them union membership (Hong, 2017; Jung, 2022). In other words, it is plausible that those groups of workers have been excluded from mainstream unions. Women workers in particular experience multiple forms of exclusion in the categories of company size, employment type and sector since women are more likely to work in small-scale companies and non-standard employment in service industries (Hong, 2017).

Nevertheless, Korean workers excluded from mainstream unions have developed alternative forms of unionism. Women workers have been keenly aware that they need unions geared specifically for the serious challenges working women face. Specifically, in 1999, women workers began establishing women-only trade unions, including the Korean Women’s Trade Union (KWTU). The KWTU represents all women workers across occupations and all industry employment types (Kim, 2017). Just as women created women-only trade unions, short-term, temporary or part-time workers need different kinds of unions from enterprise unions because of their intermittent employment status. As such, they have established new organizations representing workers regardless of employment status and industry (Yoo, 2015). In addition, the Hope Solidarity Union (HSU), an alternative form of union, was established in 2009 and has included workers in non-standard employment across occupations and companies based on social-movement trade union principles (Park, 2021). Social movement trade unionism has a goal of achieving both labour and civil rights in that it aims to support marginalized workers (Kim, 2017).

Writers’ collective organizations

Korean broadcasting writers have three intersectional identities, ranging from cultural workers to freelancers to women. In terms of occupation, Korean broadcasting writers are broadly categorized into television and radio writers, who participate in making television and radio shows, respectively, and translation writers, who translate radio and television programmes from foreign languages to Korean. Television writers are divided into three categories, depending on the genre each group works to produce: drama, entertainment and culture/journalism/documentary (CJD) writers. In Korea, drama programmes refer to narrative fiction genres, while entertainment shows include comedy, reality and variety shows. CJD means non-fiction programming such as journalism and documentary programmes. Regarding employment status, most Korean writers across genres work as freelancers – the only status Korean broadcasters will grant them. For this reason, many writers tend to suffer from job insecurity and excessive overtime work (Broadcasting Writers Union and National Union of Media Workers, 2016). One more important characteristic of this writing workforce is that it is highly gendered: 88.6% of the writers (3,078 out of 3,473) who have Korea Television and Radio Writers Association (KTRWA) membership were women at the end of 2018 (Korea Television and Radio Writers Association [KTRWA], 2019).

In the Korean broadcasting industry, as in other sectors described previously in this paper, most mainstream unions are enterprise unions – including those in the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) (Lee, 2009). Those unions rarely engage with labour problems such as the precarious working conditions workers in non-standard employment (hereafter non-standard workers) face in their own companies (Lee, 2009). In this industry, broadcasting writers are one of the non-standard worker groups and have therefore been excluded from mainstream unions. Nevertheless, since the early 1960s, Korean broadcasting writers have collectively struggled to improve their working conditions through five forms of collective work organizations. Most prominently, the KTRWA was established in 1962 as a professional association for experienced broadcasting writers, including television and radio writers across all genres (KTRWA, 2000). In 1999, writers at a regional broadcaster, Masan MBC, established the now-defunct Writers’ Union of Masan MBC as a branch of the larger women-only trade union, KWTU – an alternative union as described earlier in this paper. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, CJD writers for the four major broadcasters (KBS, MBC, Seoul Broadcasting System [SBS] and Korea Educational Broadcasting System [EBS]) created the four Non-fiction Broadcasting Writers Councils (NBWCs, Kusŏngjakka hyŏbŭihoe) – the KBS NBWC, the MBC NBWC, the SBS NBWC and the EBS NBWC – as sub-organizations of the KTRWA (Song, 2000). These councils are informal grassroots communities representing writers’ rights to improve their working conditions and facilitating mutual support among writers.

In 2017, Korean writers established the Broadcasting Writers Union (BWU), a union for all writers regardless of their work experience and genre, as a branch of an industrial union, the National Union of Media Workers (NUMW). A year later, writers also participated in establishing the Broadcasting Staff Union (BSU) as a branch of a social movement union, the HSU. These organizations have different characteristics – ranging from a professional association to informal grassroots communities, to a women-only trade union, to a union of media workers in non-standard employment. However, none of these collective organizations has been categorized as a traditional union, and to date none has the right to collectively bargain based on labour laws. Only the KTRWA has been able to gain the right to collectively bargain based on collective agreements with broadcasters – a right KTRWA members achieved through strikes.

Research questions and method

To examine Korean writers’ labour activism and their difficulties in achieving collective actions in association with these five collective organizations, I pay special attention to why writers have felt a need to establish new forms of labour rights and organizations. Specifically, I examine questions such as – What modes of resistance and collective organization have Korean writers enacted? What difficulties do writers in collective organizations face in their collective activism? What distinctive features do the organizations present in terms of women’s struggles or cultural producers’ struggles? Fractures and cooperation among writers and between writers and other workers, such as producer-directors (PDs), are also examined.

For this research, I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 23 research participants from the five collective organizations in Korea between June 2018 and August 2019. The interviewees included current or former writers who worked or work as activists, organizers and/or directors for the above organizations. In addition, my research participants included non-writers: one executive office chief from the KTRWA, two organizers from the NUMW, one organizer from the BSU, one activist of the People’s Coalition for Media Reform (who engaged in organizing the BSU) and one independent PD from the Korean Independent Producers & Directors’ Association (who participated in the BSU). In the following sections, I refer to most interviewees using pseudonyms and numbers, i.e., ‘Research participant 1.’ The interviews I conducted are referenced as personal communication, i.e., ‘(Research participant 1, 2018, personal communication).’ Real names are used only for those individuals who chose to be identified in my research findings.

Writers in a craft union: Solidarity and their intellectual rights

The KTRWA in January 2019 had 3,509 members (KTRWA, 2019). My interviews suggest that, while the KTRWA is a professional association, it has at least partly served a de facto role as a craft union along the lines of the WGA in the United States. A craft union is a form of union that organizes a group of skilled workers who share a common job or occupation (Kim, 2005). Specifically, the KTRWA has played a critical role in improving writers’ working conditions in that it has struggled to increase their pay through continual collective action such as strikes, during which writers refused to provide scripts to broadcasting companies (KTRWA, 2000).

Such collective action has enabled Korean writers to hold intellectual property. In the 1970s and 1980s, broadcasting companies syndicated and reran television shows without permission from or remuneration to writers (Kim, 2014b). Some writers within the KTRWA sued broadcasters for infringement of their intellectual property rights, recognizing they would need to use litigation as the legal method to establish a precedent for acknowledging such rights (KTRWA, 2000). In 1987, writers faced a critical moment regarding intellectual property rights when the Copyright Act was amended to include new articles titled Special Cases Concerning Cinematographic Works. As these articles stated, when a contract between a writer and a broadcasting company does not specify that the company should pay the writer for reruns or other uses of programmes based on the writer’s scripts, the writer cannot ask to be compensated for these scripts later. Since individual writers do not have the bargaining power to ask for such clauses to be included in contracts, the KTRWA requested that broadcasters make collective agreements with the KTRWA to pay its members for intellectual rights (Kim, 2014b). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the KTRWA staged strikes and succeeded in achieving collective agreements with KBS, MBC, SBS and EBS (KTRWA, 2000). These agreements defined basic writing fee standards and copyright fees, such as payments for reruns and syndications. Since then, the KTRWA has expanded its collective agreements with broadcasting companies, such as cable television channels, as new broadcasters have entered the market (Ji-Sook Kim, 2018, personal communication). It has negotiated with major broadcasters to increase writing fees and royalties for shows for which writers produce scripts.

Indeed, the KTRWA’s collective agreements have improved writers’ rights in two ways. First, they ensure writers maintain copyrights and receive royalties (Yu, 2006) while other professionals, such as freelance PDs in the television industry and film industry writers, do not. Second, the KTRWA collective agreements mandated that major broadcasters regularly negotiate their basic writing fee standards with the KTRWA, which means this professional association regularly engages in collective bargaining with the broadcasters. In this respect, the KTRWA partially plays the role of a labour union. On the other hand, as this professional association achieved collective agreements that ensure regular collective bargaining, it has relatively less motivation to transform itself into a formal trade union than other organizations that do not have such agreements. Moreover, if the KTRWA becomes a labour union, which has traditionally been based on more formal employment relations between workers and companies in Korea, it would be involved in a dispute surrounding writers’ intellectual property rights in the Korean legal system. In other words, during the litigation and strikes regarding intellectual property rights and copyright fees, when writers asked for their rights and compensation, it mattered whether writers worked as employees of broadcasters (KTRWA, 2000). Specifically, if scripts were considered a result of work for hire, writers could not argue ownership of copyright. Thus, to receive intellectual property rights and copyright fees, the KTRWA and writers had to prove that they had worked as self-employed workers, not employees who could receive employee benefits and job security.

Indeed, the KTRWA’s basic writing fee standards played a role in setting pay for most writers in the 1990s in that most writers received fees according to these standards (Ji-Sook Kim, 2018, personal communication). However, at present the standards are significantly lower than the actual writing fees that most writers receive as their pay; in fact, they are used only to determine the minimum pay for new writers. This change has occurred as Korean broadcasters have paid writing fees to most writers by using their own pay systems and differentiating pay among writers based on meritocratic logic (Ji-Sook Kim, 2018, personal communication). It is plausible that, as some individual workers improve their own working conditions, they could be demotivated to act for better working conditions for all members. In other words, it seems that the discretionary payments by broadcasters have undermined the power that the KTRWA was able to leverage based on writers’ solidarity.

Nevertheless, the KTRWA negotiates with broadcasters to increase the minimum pay for writers within its membership. Thus, craft solidarity among writers in the KTRWA still underlies how the KTRWA has improved working conditions for writers across genres. Specifically, drama writers with bargaining power – based on the market for shows that they script – have contributed to increasing the KTRWA’s basic writing fee standards for other genres (Ok-young Kim, 2018, personal communication). However, the KTRWA grants membership only to writers who meet a high threshold of work experience. The KTRWA does not sufficiently support writers without membership, including less experienced writers, yet that support is one of the critical characteristics of craft unionism. Craft unionism generally contributes to building craft solidarity among skilled workers but often comes up short of securing comparable benefits for less experienced workers in their fields (Mosco and McKercher, 2008).

The right of precarious women workers to resist

Since the KTRWA has granted membership only to experienced writers, a growing number of less experienced writers have found themselves without an organization to represent their interests in the industry. In addition, writers at regional broadcasters often have no membership in the KTRWA and labour organizations because the criteria for membership are difficult to achieve. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, less experienced writers with major and writers with regional broadcasters played a critical role in establishing new organizations to represent themselves. Specifically, in 1999, writers at Masan MBC established the (now defunct) Writers’ Union of Masan MBC to counter precarious working conditions and inequities within the industry. A former writer playing a leading role in this unionization recalled that she was inspired by the unfair conditions under which a writing colleague worked. Her colleague received extremely low pay and worked without specific workload guidelines, subject to the dictates of a PD (Mi Gyeong Park, 2018, personal communication). Writers tried to discuss their working conditions with Masan MBC, but when the broadcaster did not communicate, the writers established a union (Mi Gyeong Park, 2018, personal communication). The writers’ union became a branch of the KWTU, one of the few unions willing to support the unionization process of writers who were predominantly women and non-standard workers.

The writers’ union requested that Masan MBC engage in regular bargaining; clarify the writers’ responsibilities; establish wage, recruitment and dismissal standards; and provide direct employment contracts (Lee, 2001). However, Masan MBC refused to negotiate, taking the position that writers are not employees and thus do not qualify for collective bargaining rights. Further, the broadcaster argued that writers should be distinguished from other labourers who receive hourly wages in that writers freely perform artistic and creative work (Lee, 2001). The union sued Mason MBC and argued that the writers held the status of de facto employees with legal labour rights (Kim, 2007). After several legal disputes and litigation, in 2003 the High Court ruled that writers are not employees, according to the Trade Union and Labour Relations Adjustment Act (Broadcasting Writers Union and National Union of Media Workers, 2016). Consequently, the Writers’ Union of Masan MBC could no longer pursue the possibility of collective bargaining with the broadcaster. As a result of this failure to obtain legal rights, the trade union was disbanded (Mi Gyeong Park, 2018, personal communication).

In the late 1990s, almost the same period when writers at Masan MBC established their union, CJD writers at the major broadcasters in Seoul metropolitan areas recognized their precarious working conditions and tried to establish their unions. In an interview, one former writer who participated in establishing NBWCs recalled how she was disappointed by the working conditions when she started working as a CJD writer at MBC in the 1990s. She lamented how writers suffered from low pay and job insecurity and was upset about how in-house PDs unilaterally decided writers’ pay levels (Sookeung Jung, 2018, personal communication). In the late 1990s, CJD writers at the four major broadcasters in Seoul succeeded in establishing the NBWCs. To cooperate with each other, the four NBWCs established one umbrella organization, the Non-fiction Writers Society (kusŏng tak’yu yŏn’guhoe), as a sub-organization of the KTRWA (Ok-young Kim, 2018, personal communication). The NBWCs focussed only on the working conditions of CJD writers with full KTRWA membership at major broadcasters. Therefore, they did not sufficiently support less experienced writers, such as assistant writers who do not have KTRWA membership.

These NBWCs have survived as informal communities without formal bargaining rights. Nevertheless, my interviewees suggest that the NBWCs have played a role in improving working conditions for CJD writers at the major broadcasters even while, according to the broadcaster, the actual roles and power of the NBWCs have varied. For example, the SBS NBWC has partially succeeded in increasing pay and obtaining minor benefits such as food vouchers, transportation fees and vacations for CJD writers in this council. Because more experienced writers have actively managed the organization and put pressure on SBS, the SBS NBWC has from time to time had its concerns represented, a point confirmed by an SBS writer I interviewed (Research participant 1, 2018, personal communication). However, the fact remains that the four NBWCs, including the SBS NBWC, do not have the legal right to bargain if broadcasters refuse to negotiate with writers. Thus, there is no legal process to force broadcasters to negotiate.

During the interviews, I found that many writers who had been critical of writers’ working conditions also tended to be skeptical about writer unionization. Moreover, one writer recalled that, when she started as an assistant writer in the early 2000s, she told her colleague that writers needed a union to fix their poor working conditions. Her colleague responded, ‘Do not be ridiculous, because writers at Masan MBC tried to unionize and they lost their jobs’ (Research participant 2, 2018, personal communication).

Solidarity and fractures among workers

In the late 2010s, two Korean broadcasting industry trade unions for non-standard workers, including writers, were established: the BWU on November 11, 2017 and the BSU on July 4, 2018. While the activism of non-standard workers in the Korean broadcasting industry had already developed, the encouraging political circumstances galvanized workers to realize their activism in the form of union-building. Indeed, at that time the Korean national government under the Jae-in Moon regime (from 2017 to 2022) set policy goals that included laying the foundation of a society that respects labour, which encouraged non-standard workers to unionize and contributed to the unionization of these workers (Jung, 2022). For example, during this period the Korean unionization rate increased from 10.7% in 2017 to 14.2% in 2020 (Ministry of Employment and Labor, 2021). Notably, writers cooperated with other occupations in forming and developing these two organizations. In this section, I show how Korean writers developed these unions based on solidarity with other occupations. But at the same time, fractures threatened these nascent organizations due to complex employment relations and differences in working conditions in the Korean broadcasting industry.

As previously described in this paper, the BWU was established as a branch of its parent industrial union, the NUMW, which has historically included enterprise unions such as the KBS and MBC. The BWU stemmed from the NUMW’s project to organize non-standard workers, such as freelancers and temporary employees in the broadcasting industry (Choi, 2015). However, writers led the establishment of a trade union for writers (Man-jae Lee, 2018, personal communication). The writers who founded the BWU welcomed the possibility of cooperation between writers and in-house workers, including in-house PDs (who have standard employment contracts with broadcasters), in negotiating with broadcasters. To some degree, when writers at regional broadcasters were unionized, the NUMW often facilitated cooperation between writers and standard, in-house workers at regional broadcasters (Yu Ri Choi, 2018, personal communication). However, when I interviewed experienced writers working at major broadcasters, they pointed out that they hesitated to join the BWU due to the potential conflict of interest between writers and in-house PDs. This conflict could arise because in-house PDs often play a managerial role, such as hiring and firing writers and evaluating writers’ performance. Specifically, some directly stated that they did not engage in the BWU because its parent union, the NUMW, represents in-house workers.

The BWU aimed to establish an inclusive union that could represent all writers regardless of seniority, genre and location, and protect and improve their rights and interests. In fact, after the establishment of the BWU, writers at regional broadcasters actively participated in the organization because their working conditions were poorer than those of writers at major broadcasters in Seoul metropolitan areas. Commonly, these groups of writers do not have membership in the KTRWA. Therefore, before the BWU’s founding, many writers at regional broadcasters could not get support when they faced payment delays, unfair firings and other issues (Jung-Yeol Yeom, 2018, personal communication). In the most successful case related to the BWU’s efforts to ensure its members’ labour rights via a trade union, the writers at Daegu MBC achieved a documented collective agreement with the company with continued collective bargaining. Several branches of the BWU succeeded in increasing pay for their members. However, my interviews suggest that many regional broadcasters have in fact refused to engage in formal collective bargaining, denying that the BWU has the legal right to request it. As previously described in this paper, this problem has been a major challenge to Korean writers’ unionization. Indeed, this challenge shows that the unionization of cultural workers, who are often self-employed, needs a change in the Korean labour laws to encompass the status of labourers and labour rights.

In contrast to the BWU’s focus on writers, the BSU is a union for all types of workers, including writers with non-standard employment in the Korean broadcasting industry. The BSU originated as an autonomous aggregation of non-standard workers in the industry based in a mobile chat room called the Pangsonggye Kapchil 119 (here after PK 119). ² The PK 119 was created in December 2017 as an offshoot of another mobile chat room, Chikchang Kapchil 119, which was initiated and managed by a civic non-profit organization with the same name, Chikchang Kapchil 119, aimed at supporting Korean workers’ labour rights. ³ The PK 119 staff consisted of about 25 activists from diverse areas, including activists in social movement organizations, lawyers and certified labour attorneys, and they managed the PK 119 chat room (Suntaek Kwon, 2018, personal communication). In this chat room, precarious workers got together and discussed a range of labour problems, including unfair dismissals and delayed wages. While discussing their working conditions, many non-standard employees or self-employed workers agreed they needed a union, resulting in the establishment of the BSU that summer (Suntaek Kwon, 2018, personal communication).

In contrast to the BWU, the BSU organizers wanted to become a branch of the HSU, which mainly represents non-standard workers. The workers who established the BSU fell into three groups of non-standard workers: CJD and entertainment writers, PDs and drama production staff. Granted, workers have formed solidarity across these three occupations; in the long term, the BSU aims to include all non-standard workers in the broadcasting industry. Yet this development requires setting common strategies and processes, difficult to accomplish in the short term. Specifically, because the working patterns and conditions of the workers vary depending on genre and occupation, this union had difficulty organizing so many different worker groups at the same time (Man-jae Lee, 2018, personal communication). In 2018, when I conducted interviews, the HSU was focussing on organizing drama production staff rather than writers and PDs. In fact, the working patterns and conditions are diverse even among writers. For example, one activist who has not worked in the broadcasting industry stated that ‘it is difficult to categorize the diverse range of writers’ labour patterns, employment statuses, working conditions and duties and, therefore, it is challenging to build common agendas that reflect writers’ demands’ (Yu Ri Choi, 2018, personal communication). The fragmentation of writers’ working conditions gets in the way of collective resistance to poor working conditions. However, as this paper has shown, writers have taken collective action and continuously tried to build organizations to represent themselves.

Cultural workers’ labour rights

In this section, I describe how writers face both complexity and new possibilities surrounding their labour rights and movements as cultural workers, focussing on the writers’ engagement in unionism in the late 2010s. My interviews for this research suggest that, while writers wish to have their labour rights acknowledged and achieve job security, not all writers agree that the only means for achieving this goal should be to make all writers employees of the broadcasters. In other words, while some writers want permanent, full-time employment contracts with job security, other writers do not see that acquiring such contracts can resolve their labour issues. Indeed, some of the writers I interviewed did not want to join the BWU because that would mean defining themselves as an employee of a broadcaster. Even some BWU members told me that they preferred to work as freelancers while still wanting to improve their working conditions. For example, as one writer who worked as a BWU activist described,

Many people misunderstand that we are asking for employment contracts with broadcasters. . . .. It is true that job insecurity is a huge concern. However, writers have worked as freelancers for a long time. Not all writers want to have permanent, full-time employment or contractual employment. We are raising a problem against dismissals without clear reasons and asking for minimum protections. (Jung-Yeol Yeom, 2018, personal communication)

Some interviewees preferred freelancing, despite the lack of job security, because they wanted to achieve autonomy in producing content as creators and they believed that employees do not have such autonomy. For example, one writer with more than 20 years’ experience did not agree with the idea that writers should work as salaried employees:

Anyway, the employees of a company cannot be independent of the company to which they belong. They have to follow the orders of the company. Writers can be free from a specific company because they don’t belong to the company. (Research participant 3, 2018, personal communication)

Underscored here is that, for cultural workers, labour autonomy and rights often seem to conflict. When writers define themselves as employees of broadcasters, the employment relationship indicates that writers have to work under the direction and control of the broadcasters (Yu, 2006). Therefore, if writers as cultural workers are supposed to perform their work autonomously, they encounter a dilemma when defining their specific work and identities. One research participant who criticized how broadcasters exploit writers argued that ‘employees are those who work in a way that companies control and direct. I do not work under the direction of companies. Broadcasters cannot say ‘you should do this’ [to me]’ (Research participant 4, 2019, personal communication). As this quote indicates, some writers want to produce cultural products independently and autonomously as freelancers. While writers choose their jobs only among particular programmes offered by broadcasters, they can at least refuse what they do not want to make. Several writers value the opportunity to refuse specific jobs and choose which programme to work on as freelancers. Many writers desire autonomy and flexibility in their work as a basic labour right, even though this level of choice is usually achieved only by a few privileged, successful writers.

Another important motivation behind the desire of some writers to work as freelancers is the dilemma presented by the incompatibility between employee labour rights and creative copyrights in the legal system in Korea (Yu, 2006). For example, workers must be employees to establish trade unions, which could then give them the right to conduct collective bargaining and to strike (Yu, 2006). In the case of writers who receive their remuneration through copyright as well as wages, it is not easy to ask for labour rights based on employment contracts. If writers argue that they are employees of a broadcaster and request labour rights, they can lose their right to intellectual property. Conversely, if writers argue that they conduct their work independently without direct employment relations with broadcasters, writers can claim copyright to intellectual property, but they cannot ask for their labour rights as employees (Yu, 2006).

Some writers I interviewed understood that a situation where most writers are forced to work only as freelancers is problematic. For example, as one writer described,

Writers are forced to work as freelancers. Writers in the Korean broadcasting industry can never become permanent, full-time workers. We are not even allowed to work as temporary agency employees. . . . I decided to work as an activist for the BWU in order to enable writers to work with various employment statuses. (Research participant 5, 2018, personal communication)

This excerpt demonstrates that some writers connected a unified form of employment status with inequity among workers. As a case in point, in 2019 activists and organizers made a short documentary film entitled Women Workers in Broadcasting Station (Irhanŭn yŏjadŭl). This film deals with one writer activist’s work and life, framing her problem as typical of those facing Korean women workers in their workplace and household. In other words, this film defines writers’ labour problems as women workers’ issues related to gender inequity in Korea.

Conclusion: Writers’ resistance in the making

This article has explored how Korean broadcasting writers have encountered distinctive difficulties in their labour activism and collective actions, including unionization. These gendered cultural workers have established alternative forms of organization beyond mainstream Korean unionism, which is historically tied to the situation of male industrial workers and employment relationships between employers and labourers. Given the many efforts detailed above, I argue that because most Korean writers have intersectional identities – as women, freelancers and cultural workers – their working experiences are complex, and their labour activism has been multi-dimensional based on their gender, precarious employment status and occupation.

Korean broadcasting writers, usually self-employed, have faced multiple challenges in taking collective action. These writers have had to fight for the right to resist unfair working conditions and conduct collective actions because Korean labour laws have not supported their activism. Historically, writers in the broadcasting industry have struggled to gain the right to collectively bargain with broadcasters who have avoided their responsibilities as employers, such as engaging in collective bargaining. Thus, another important finding is that these writers have faced conflicts about what rights to prioritize as cultural workers. On the one hand, Korean writers are sometimes forced to work precariously as self-employed to gain intellectual property rights for cultural products they produce because, in the Korean legal system, employee labour rights are incompatible with intellectual property rights. On the other hand, based on their occupational identity as creators of cultural products, some Korean writers prefer to work as freelancers because they believe that being self-employed enables them to produce cultural products more independently than if they were employed by a particular company. Notably, while these writers struggle for better working conditions, they do not and cannot follow the traditional labour model based on that of permanent, full-time employees. Writers are still imagining and exploring what labour and resistance models are suitable for a diverse set of gendered, precarious cultural workers.

The differences and variations in Korean broadcasting writers’ labour activism also depend on the genres they work to produce and where they work. This article does not show these variations specifically, which suggests a direction for further study. Nevertheless, this article contributes to making visible the labour activism of writers, one of the most precarious working classes under multiple forms of marginalization in the Korean broadcasting industry. Indeed, although Korean writers have collectively struggled for several decades, their labour activism has not been considered unionism. In this regard, this article offers a counter-case against arguments that cultural workers tend to be less engaged in or encouraged towards labour activism than traditional industrial workers, who are mostly male and work full-time in the manufacturing industry. Finally, this article suggests that the Korean legal system should account for the intersectional identities of cultural workers and update notions that labour is defined by employment relations. More broadly, working creatively, autonomously, and equitably should be acknowledged as a basic labour right.