The true Union story about the Netflix runaway series Squid Game

What the show is about

The compelling Netflix TV series Squid Game - set in modern South Korea - is the most watched show in Netflix’s history. The series portrays a violent survival game in which desperate and impoverished competitors compete to the death to win a huge glass pig filled with 46.5 billion won (nearly $40 million).

Though even casual viewers can quickly grasp the show’s concern over inequality between the rich and the poor, much of its worldwide audience may miss the way that Squid Game comments on Korea’s union history and the role of worker solidarity in sustaining the humanity of the oppressed.

Squid Game critiques Korea’s growing social and economic inequality when it showcases the dismal daily life of its impoverished characters. All the people who join the deadly Squid Games are poor and alienated, including the lead character, laid-off union auto worker Seong Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae), along with a failed stockbroker, a North Korean defector, a petty gangster, a lonely elderly man, and a migrant Pakistani factory worker.

To understand how bad it really is for workers in South Korea, the ABC recently presented a story on its Foreign Correspondent called “Dead on Arrival” about the growing inequity of transport workers in South Korea. They call it “kwarosa” which translates to “death from overwork”. Where South Korea’s delivery workers say they are being sacrificed to keep the nation going during the pandemic.

Despite the fact that Korea’s economy has become the 10th-richest in the world, these struggling Koreans represent the growing socioeconomic divide in a society where personal debt has risen to a staggering 104 percent of national gross domestic product this year, 35 percent higher than in 2007.

What is the shows connection to union

The casual viewer of Squid Game is likely unaware, but there are subtle nods to Korea’s labour movement. A real-life event in Korean history with the 2009 SsangYong Motors strike, a struggle that ended in violent defeat when hundreds of rampaging police charged into the motor vehicle factory and brutally beat down striking workers. It was a 77 day long strike that started when the company unexpectedly laid of 43% of its entire workforce (2,646 workers) to facilitate a