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& the inequities of the South Korean industrial relations system.

profit-driven transfer of its assets to global investors. In protest over 2,600 workers occupied the Ssangyong plant for 77 days to protest these layoffs before police violently quelled the strike.

After the strike was violently suppressed, in August 2009 about ninety-four workers were jailed and 230 were prosecuted. To date, more than thirty workers and family members are dead by their own hands or from conditions related to the trauma they endured.

Game, but much of the country still turns a blind eye to the fact that it is one of a few democracies in which the government can sue workers for damages in connection with industrial action The strikers were blackballed from employment with other large Korean companies.

In addition, SsangYong and local police used civil courts to sue them for damaging the company.

Union members were ordered to pay hefty “economic damage” fines of about $9 million—a sum that these workers did not have and would never see in their lives. What’s more, the deferred interest on these fines was to increase by 620,000 won per day, soon exceeding 1.5 times the principal owed.

(instant noodles) because I can’t afford to buy rice.”

Another worker told his wife, “I am leaving you debts only until the last moment. I am so sorry.” Between 2009 and 2018, another 30 SsangYong workers died by suicide for similar reasons.

Solidarity prevails

Throughout Squid Game, the union worker Gi-hun shows compassion for other participants, sacrificing his own survival prospects to stand with contestants like a sick elderly man and a mortally wounded young woman. His strong moral compassion is driven by what the final episode presents as his “trust in humanity,” a sentiment of solidarity that is at the very foundation of what it means to believe in the union and what it can achieve.

The South Korean government claimed they would protect these workers, but instead ran roughshod over them. The country’s weak social safety net makes a layoff nearly a death sentence. If workers can’t hang onto what they have, they will begin a vertical free fall. This is bankruptcy in its fullest sense, socially and financially. So, if workers didn’t die from the occupation of the motor facility, they died by suicide in the months after.

Plus people in South Korea love Squid

To pay these astronomical fines for their union activity, workers’ wages and assets (including even their homes) were sometimes seized by courts.

They were delivered to SsangYong Motor Company or the police under Korea’s harsh anti-union “economic damage” compensation laws.

Thirteen SsangYong workers and family members died by suicide as a result of this anti-union oppression between 2009 and 2011.

One worker’s final statement read, “My salary was reduced dramatically, and it is painful to feed my kids ramen