In the 1970s, my grandfather bought a three-wheeler mini truck, a small but mobile Kia T-600, with all his savings in South Korea. He did not graduate elementary school and had returned from years of child labor in Japan with some savings for a family he started at a young age. He was economically vulnerable, undereducated, and a typical candidate to dip his toes in urban cargo-transport work in the economically developing country under military dictatorship. One day, his truck was involved in a road accident, leaving the family in extreme debt. As a result, my grandparents and their four children became homeless, living in a shack they built themselves in the hills. The whole family produced charcoal for seven years, tending to soot-covered kilns for survival until they could pay off the debt for the truck, the only economic asset they had.

Decades later, prospects for truckers in the country remain bleak. In a complicated leasing system with colonial origins — the ji-ib system — truckers in South Korea have been left out of the modernization of employment relations. This exploitative contracting system outsources the risk inherent to the maintenance of the vehicle, as well as the health and safety of drivers and road users.

The South Korean labor movement took a militant turn in the late 1980s, when the democratization movement against the military dictatorship erupted in a national wave of protests and astronomical unionization rates. Those protests bore immense fruit: labor laws protect most workers in formal employment contracts in factories and white-collar jobs, but they leave out those whose precarious employment contracts fall through the cracks. Truck workers, who still operated under the ji-ib system, were left behind until the 2000s, when a second wave of the labor movement started to shift its focus to informal and precarious workers.