The State of Our Union

This title could be taken to mean many things. And in this case, it does. This is a report on the state of my relationship. This is a report on the state of the Migrants' Trade Union, which has great bearing on my relationship. And lastly, this is a report, much like GWB's State of THE Union last week, that is bogged down by the reality of a situation in which you just can't win. Period.

So let me start off by saying that I am not in a funk again. I am just faced with what seems to be, despite my simpleness of mind and life style, an increasingly complicated situation. It is no secret that the General Secretary and I are caught up in the politics of Korea. He, the leader of a trade union that fights quite militantly for the rights of undocumented workers, and I from a trade union background, are united by a simple philosophy: Life is not fair, but if we work together we can make it better. And despite all of the set backs, the shit that life throws at you, and the losses, I still believe it to be true and so does he.

So why then, is this philosophy, and specifically our common desire to build a democratic movement that will give migrant workers a voice and some power, the very thing that is tearing us apart?

This has been a particularly bad year for foreign workers in Korea. After the 2 year mark of Korea's new immigration law, EPS, which was supposed to reduce corruption and make improvements on migrants' rights and rates of documentation, the number of undocumented workers has unofficially soared to nearly 70% of the foreign worker population. And as a result, the government crackdown on undocumented workers has also gone through the roof in an effort to bring this number down. Additionally, the right wing of Korea is saying that EPS is too generous to migrant workers in Korea, and that further restrictions on migration need to be made.

We have seen so many friends get caught by immigration this year. The government has some fancy new strategies that make immigration officials harder to recognize, and therefore has made it more difficult for us to warn our friends (we have set up an alert system, so when someone see a crackdown, they report it and a message goes out to everyone so that they can avoid that area). Everyone is more afraid to leave their houses or factories, and everyone is more afraid to fight for fear of becoming a government target. When just over a month ago our friend Jaman was caught at his factory, immigration officials were downright celebratory in the
detention center when they realized they had caught a leader. And accordingly, they made life more difficult for him in the detention center.

And now, immigration officials do not only raid factories and subway stations, but also mosques, markets and any place they believe an undocumented worker might live or hang out. In short, undocumented workers in Korea have no right to live, no right to sleep, no right to go shopping for necessities, and no right to worship, but are in fact needed for the economy and coveted by bosses, for the more terrorized migrants are, the easier it is to exploit them.

All this said, it is not as though migrant workers have had no victories this year. MTU and another trade union in Daegu have been able help workers recover lost wages, get work injuries paid for by employers, and in some cases, have even got undocumented workers released from detention centers.

All of this makes for an extremely busy General Secretary. A GS who works from morning until past midnight nearly 7 days a week. A GS who rarely sleeps and who sees his friends even less. A GS who has no time for a personal life (ie no time for me). And so I'm not going to lie. I was downright happy when he told me that we was not going to seek a second term for MTU. I became optimistic, thinking that finally we would have a chance to see what life together might be like if we actually had time for each other.

But this was not to be. The pressure for him to run started a few weeks ago and has been relentless. And I, for the most part of have been silent, not wanting to pressure him, only wanting him to make a decision about what he wants to do. And I was pretty confident that his decision was to leave leadership and become a regular old member again. So when he told me on Monday that he was running for a second term as General Secretary, I had a bit of a meltdown... When, after all, is OUR life going to start?

But here is the reality. Even if the GS did become a member again, he is still undocumented. He would have to find some shitty work in some shitty factory that he is overqualified for. He would have to work 14 hours or more everyday in a job that has takes no safety precautions for a pittance, all the while looking out to make sure immigration doesn't raid his factory while he is there. He might have to live in said factory because it is becoming more difficult to work in Seoul due to all the crackdown. He is more likely to get caught, more likely to get injured and in fact, we probably wouldn't see each other anymore than we do now...

And, well, I have to admit that he is the rightful leader of MTU. He has a plan, he knows what to do, he has all the connections with unions, support groups, government parties (actually, he is an elected representative in the Korean Democratic Labor Party and in the last election, got more votes than any other candidate who ran for a post) and officials, and people trust him to do the right thing. The GS was born to be an organizer. So how could I be angry at him for doing it?

So now I'm realizing that our problems have an external source: Global capitalism. Does that sound crazy? Well, think about it. He left Bangladesh so that he could have a job. He came to Korea and found that it was impossible to stay here legally. But he didn't have much choice, needed money and stayed. He became outraged at how he and his friends were treated here and became a fighter. And it's ironic that he is safer from immigration and makes nearly the same amount of money (okay, less, but it is stable income) as other migrant workers by fighting for their rights here, which someone has to do. So for him, on the personal front, it is a situation that he can't win. And that's the case for the rest of the migrant workforce here, too. They have to survive, and as I'm finding out, this comes at enormous personal cost. It is just not possible to survive AND have a healthy, functioning family. It is not possible to survive AND have what Americans (who have never undertaken the migration process) would consider a "normal" relationship.

Global capitalism is not an excuse for some of the bad choices that both of us make, but I am learning the hard way that I have to adjust my expectations of what it means to be in love, have a relationship and be happy with what you have....

Just... Why does it have to be so hard? I never realized before that loving someone and actually being with him is a privilege that a lot people don't experience because of their economic situation. And it really gets me when I hear people say, "How could he leave his family for 10 years?!" Well, the reality is that the family is able to eat, have a house and get an education because he left them for 10 years. This system is tearing families, lovers and friends apart. This system is leaving thousands of children fatherless (and in some cases completely parentless). This system is also preventing me, white middle class college educated American, from being with the person I love in a "normal" way.

This system sucks.

I hope we can make enough money to leave Korea soon... I hope we can survive the political reality of living in Korea as foreigners, one documented, one without even a passport... I hope we can change this filthy, rotten system for good so that our kids (the editorial "our") don't have to make the same kinds of hard decisions that we do about loving or living.