After 12 years of cam­paigns and protests against unjust lay­offs, 180 female atten­dants at South Korea’s pre­mier train ser­vice are get­ting their jobs back. These tena­cious women work­ers defeat­ed a ham-hand­ed pri­va­ti­za­tion effort and cor­rupt polit­i­cal collusion.

The KTX is South Korea’s answer to bul­let trains. The country’s Rail­road Admin­is­tra­tion launched it in 2004 and select­ed 351 female atten­dants, all in their twen­ties, from a pool of 4,600 appli­cants who dreamed of becom­ing ​“flight atten­dants on the ground.”

For these young col­lege grad­u­ates, the job seemed to com­bine the job secu­ri­ty of a civ­il ser­vant with the pay and dig­ni­ty of a flight atten­dant — one of the bet­ter jobs then avail­able to young women in South Korea.

A lengthy stand­off began in 2006 when the Korea Rail­road Cor­po­ra­tion (KORAIL) laid off 290 KTX atten­dants as part of its now-botched pri­va­ti­za­tion plan. Now the stand­off has final­ly end­ed. The cor­po­ra­tion said on July 21 that it would hire back the atten­dants over the next year.

Pri­va­ti­za­tion and layoff

Con­trary to their expec­ta­tions, the atten­dants were hired by a food cater­ing arm of the rail­road admin­is­tra­tion on a tem­po­rary nine-month basis until year-end in 2004. The gov­ern­ment agency promised that they would be hired full-time when the admin­is­tra­tion became a state-owned cor­po­ra­tion, a pre­lim­i­nary step toward privatization.

But in Jan­u­ary 2005, after the admin­is­tra­tion became state-owned KORAIL, it did not hire the atten­dants direct­ly. Instead, the cater­ing arm, which now became a KORAIL sub­sidiary respon­si­ble for KTX pas­sen­ger ser­vice, offered the atten­dants a one-year tem­po­rary contract.

By the end of the year, almost all the atten­dants (393 by then) joined the Kore­an Rail­way Work­ers Union (KRWU), which is part of the Kore­an Con­fed­er­a­tion of Trade Unions, the more pro­gres­sive of the country’s two rival union federations.

In March 2006 they walked off the job, demand­ing full-time sta­tus at KORAIL. That May, the sub­sidiary laid off 280 strik­ing atten­dants who reject­ed the con­tract that would annu­al­ly renew their tem­po­rary employment.

4 , 526 days

This was how their 4,526-day cam­paign start­ed. Here is a quick run­down of their major protests:

In May 2006, the police arrest­ed about 80 atten­dants who occu­pied the Seoul office of the KORAIL.

In Jan­u­ary 2007, KTX union lead­ers began a sit-in at the Seoul cen­tral sta­tion, which last­ed on and off until this July.

In August 2008, three union­ists staged a sit-in on the top of a light­ing tow­er at the sta­tion, which last­ed more than 20 days.

Over time, 100 work­ers dropped out. The remain­ing 180 con­tin­ued their protests in a vari­ety of forms — such as leaflet­ting, sit-ins, and teach-ins — while they went about their lives, start­ed fam­i­lies, and got new jobs.

Clum­sy pri­va­ti­za­tion, cost­ly resistance

Mean­while, KORAIL’s attempt at pri­va­ti­za­tion back­fired, as engi­neers and main­te­nance work­ers mount­ed resis­tance. In Decem­ber 2014, rail­road work­ers staged a 22-day strike, the longest such stop­page in the country’s his­to­ry, against KTX’s plan to spin off the most lucra­tive por­tion of KTX. Man­age­ment dis­missed 98 work­ers and formed STX, the spinoff.

How­ev­er, KORAIL had come to under­stand that labor resis­tance would make any fur­ther pri­va­ti­za­tion attempt pro­hib­i­tive­ly cost­ly. Also, its pri­va­ti­za­tion plan turned out to be clum­sy at best. The STX now suf­fers low mar­gins, prompt­ing the gov­ern­ment to float a pro­pos­al to merge the spin­off back into the KTX.

Legal tri­umph dashed

After the light­ing tow­er sit-in, in Novem­ber 2008, 34 of the KTX union mem­bers filed a law­suit ask­ing the court to deter­mine whether they were employ­ees of the KORAIL.

A year lat­er, the court ruled in the work­ers’ favor. It was a mile­stone vic­to­ry for all work­ers in South Korea, where once-good jobs had been becom­ing more and more pre­car­i­ous and scarcer and scarcer.

Man­age­ment appealed the deci­sion. The women had to wait anoth­er two years until 2011 before the appeals court upheld the ear­li­er deci­sion. KORAIL paid the atten­dants four years’ worth of back pay but did not rein­state them. It brought the case to South Korea’s supreme court. In 2015, eight years after the first law­suit, the supreme court reversed the low­er-court ruling.

Sui­cide under debt

KORAIL’s retal­i­a­tion was swift and cru­el. It quick­ly won an injunc­tion to col­lect an aver­age of KRW 86.4 mil­lion ($76,000) that it had paid to each laid-off attendant.

In March 2016, a 36-year-old for­mer atten­dant plunged her­self to death, leav­ing a short note to her three-year-old daugh­ter: ​“I am sor­ry, my baby. All I can leave with you is debt.”

Into 2017, the polit­i­cal bal­ance began to tilt toward the KTX atten­dants’ cam­paign. In March, amid months of mass protests, the country’s con­sti­tu­tion­al court impeached Pres­i­dent Park Geun-hye, who used her shaman­ic friend to receive mas­sive bribes from cor­po­ra­tions. Three months lat­er, the coun­try elect­ed as pres­i­dent Moon Jae-in, a for­mer stu­dent activist and human rights lawyer, who, among oth­er things, promised the rein­state­ment of KTX attendants.

While praised as a medi­a­tor over a denu­clearized Kore­an penin­su­la between the two volatile lead­ers, Don­ald Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea, Mr. Moon has remained reluc­tant in push­ing through pro-labor reforms.

Occu­py­ing the Supreme Court

The KTX atten­dants, now in their mid ‑thir­ties, wait­ed a year for the new pres­i­dent to make good on his promise. On May 24, they pitched a canopy again at the Seoul sta­tion, begin­ning anoth­er sit-in. The work­ers said they would con­tin­ue to squat at the sta­tion until their reinstatement.

Less than a week into the sit-in, bomb­shell news dropped on the coun­try: a supreme court jus­tice had twist­ed the law and made rul­ings from 2013 to 2016 to please the now-impeached Pres­i­dent Park. Among these rul­ings was one against the KTX atten­dants in 2015.

Fol­low­ing the news, on May 29, tens of for­mer KTX atten­dants, wav­ing the pic­ture of their union sis­ter who had tak­en her own life, attempt­ed to occu­py the supreme court.

Prompt­ed by what is shap­ing up to be the worst judi­cial cri­sis in the country’s his­to­ry, KORAIL ini­ti­at­ed dia­logue with the union and decid­ed to rein­state the 180 workers.

“We want­ed to prove that we were not wrong,” said Kim Seung-ha, a shop stew­ard with the KTX atten­dants’ branch of the KRWU, com­ment­ing on the reinstatement.

This arti­cle first appeared on Labor Notes.