Laborfest: Films on Korea

Get On The Bus
(2012) By Kim Jung-kun, Busan, Korea
In a workers’ action that shook the Korean people and is now on film, KCTU trade unionist and Hanjin shipyard worker Kim Jin-suk occupied crane number 85 at the Hanjin Heavy Industry and Construction Youngdo shipyard. She was protesting the lay off of dozens of workers and the transfer of the work to the Philippines, occupying the crane for 309 days. Her occupation struck a cord as workers and families got on buses throughout the country and joined the movement to defend not only Kim Jin-suk but the many other workers who face temporary part time work. Over 30% of the workers of Korea are now temporary and this has been used as a cudgel by the bosses and corporate robber barons to weaken and destroy union labor.
The campaign against precarious work was central in this crane occupation and the support for “A World without Redundancy Dismissals and Precarious Work.” The case, and the solidarity movement it prompted, illuminates issues of precarious, contract and migrant labor in South Korea, the Philippines, Germany the United States and beyond.
http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/535250.html

Verita$, Everybody Loves Harvard
80 min. (2011) By Shin Eun-Jung
Director Shin Eun-jung will attend
Harvard is presented and used as an example throughout the world of what a university should be modeled on. Korean film director Shin Eun-jung for the first time looks at the real history of Harvard from its foundation with slave labor to the exclusion of women and the propagation of racist ideology used by the Nazis.
She also interviews intellectuals and academics, who have sought to expose this history. Included in the interviews are Noam Chomsky, Richard Levins and George Katsiaficas.
This powerful new documentary looks as well at how Harvard has played a central role in the control of the US imperial empire in shaping foreign policy for US multi-nationals and helping to train military planners on how to fight their war for the US empire. This also includes the role of Harvard in privatizing the Soviet Union and faculty, including Jeffrey Sacks, in personally and illegally profiting from this privatization despite rules against this.
It also looks at how Harvard is now leading the way in the outsourcing of workers at the University and pushing privatization on a grand scale. This film will shatter the myth that Harvard is something that should be emulated here in the US and internationally. It took a Korean woman to get to some of the real truths about the most famous university in the world.
Eun Jung Shin is from Gwangju, South Korea, where the 1980 people’s uprising was a key event in the overthrow of decades of US-backed military dictatorships. A student activist, she later worked as a TV writer for nine years.
ejindyfilm [at] gmail.com
See also:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/richard-levins/
http://www.eroseffect.com/ (George Katsiaficas)
http://www.workers.org/2005/world/gwangju-0526/
http://libcom.org/history/1980-the-kwangju-uprising
http://www.democracynow.org/2005/5/18/25_years_ago_the_kwangju_massacre
http://krcla.org/en/MOP/5.18_Gwangju_People's_Uprising
http://www.laborfest.net/2012/2012Films.htm#f6
http://www.laborfest.net/2012/2012schedule.htm