Bank union people going on strike again. My first feeling about that is not “good for them.” My first feeling is confusion. Like, wait, you guys can actually do that? Because where I work, in a metal processing company, this word “strike” doesn’t even connect to anything real. Nobody here would ever think about it. Not because we don’t have complaints. We have plenty.
I’ve changed company three times now, so I’ve seen a few versions of factory floor already, and honestly it’s the same story everywhere, just different faces yelling or not yelling. When bank union negotiate their pay or their hours and it makes the news, part of me is almost jealous, and part of me thinks, those people don’t know how lucky they are just to have a union that can say no to something.
Being watched forever, that’s the real problem
I made mistakes at work before. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t — I did, and it wasn’t small stuff either. I’m trying to fix myself now, actually working hard on being on time, not cutting corners, doing the boring stuff right every day. But here’s the problem. Once you mess up here, you don’t get a clean page again. Ever. My boss and my coworkers, they remember. Every small mistake I make now, even a tiny one, gets connected back in their head to what I did before. It’s like nothing ever gets deleted from the file.
So if I’m five minutes late setting up a machine, it’s not “oh he was late today.” It’s “this is just like him, remember last time.” The old mistake becomes the lens for everything new I do. I feel this almost every day now and it’s a little scary, a little annoying too, and some days I honestly don’t know which one is bigger. I still haven’t told the whole story here about what I actually did — maybe later, it’s not something I want to type out yet — but it was bad enough that even now, years later, if I forget to log a part number or leave a setting wrong on the press, somebody’s eyebrow goes up like, here we go again.
Why factory is not the same as bank office
A bank union going on strike is unusual news precisely because most unions here, especially in manufacturing, don’t have real teeth compared to what people probably imagine when they hear the word “union.” In a small-to-mid metal shop like mine I don’t even know if we have a proper union on paper, and if we do, it sure doesn’t act like the ones at the big carmakers you hear about. Banks are office workers with degrees, people expect them to negotiate like professionals. A metal shop guy complaining about conditions doesn’t get that same social permission. If I said out loud “I want better pay, better hours,” the reaction from people around me wouldn’t be support. It would be more like, be grateful you have a job at all.
My commute tells you something about how little control we actually have over our own time. Outside of rush hour it’s maybe 25 minutes by car. During real commute time it becomes over an hour, easy, same road, same distance. And there’s no negotiating that, no company shuttle talk, no “let’s do flexible starting time.” You just leave earlier. You absorb it into your own morning instead of the company changing anything for you.
Nobody tells you this part
When people talk about tough workplace culture here, usually they mean the big dramatic stuff, long hours, boss yelling. But honestly the tiring part for me isn’t the yelling. Nobody yells at me really. It’s quieter than that, it’s just this feeling that everyone around you is quietly grading you, all the time, and once you got a bad grade once, it never goes back to zero. You’re just trying to build it back slowly, one boring normal day at a time, and one bad day can knock a lot of that back down again.
I think this connects to something bigger too, not just factory work. Your reputation at a company kind of becomes permanent record here, and switching companies doesn’t erase it either, because the industry is small enough that people know people. I’ve moved three times and each time, somehow, a little bit of the old story follows me anyway. Not the whole thing, but enough that I notice it in how careful people are around me for the first few months.
So who actually gets to push back
If I had to explain this to someone outside Korea, roughly it’s like this. Big companies, the large banks, big carmakers, public sector jobs like subway or rail workers — these groups have real union structures behind them, decades of it, and that’s why their strikes actually make news, because it’s rare and it moves something. Bank strikes get attention partly because banks are usually the quiet, well-behaved white collar world, so when even they push back, it stands out.
But under that layer there’s this huge number of small and mid-size manufacturing places, service jobs, contract jobs, where basically none of that protection exists in practice. We’re probably the majority of workers in this country honestly, not the minority, but we’re the ones with no leverage. If our company decided tomorrow to change the shift pattern or cut some benefit, there’s no real mechanism for us to say no as a group. You either accept it, or you quietly start looking somewhere else, which most people don’t even have the energy for because commuting and family and everything else already eats up the day.
I do my home training in the mornings — pull ups, ab roll out, push ups, that kind of thing — partly because it’s the only part of my day that’s fully mine. Nobody at work can judge that. Nobody connects it to old mistakes. It’s just me and the pull up bar in my living room before anyone else is even up. I think a lot of guys my age end up with some small private space like that, because the big public space, the company, doesn’t leave you room to just exist without somebody watching.
What I’d actually want, if anyone asked
If somebody asked me straight, would you ever join something like a strike, my honest answer is probably not, even if I secretly agreed with the reasons. Not because I don’t believe in it. Because for someone in my spot, someone who already has a mark against him, standing out costs too much. Bank workers have some buffer, some backup behind them. I don’t have that buffer. If I stood out even a little right now it would just prove what people already think — that I’m the guy who causes trouble.
That’s the sad part underneath a lot of this. People here do have opinions about fair pay and long hours, plenty of them, they just don’t say it out loud, because talking costs more than staying quiet does. And once you’ve already burned some trust once, you really can’t afford to burn more of it.
Anyway I still read about the bank strikes with interest every time. Feels almost like a different country, even though it’s maybe two hours away by train. Different rules over there. I just don’t happen to work in that part of Korea.
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