On Friday, Jan. 13th, 2017, on the day when it snowed heavily, we, Korean Women Workers Association, had our annual meeting for the year of 2017 at Daejeon NGO Support Center. In the meeting, we talked about our new year plan as well as our achievements last year. We also elected our new leaders during the meeting! 



▲(From the left) Yongmi Kim (activist, Korean Women Workers Association at Gwangju), Myeongsuk Park (president, Korean Women Workers Association at Incheon / elected auditor), Seongyeop Lee (CPA / elected auditor), Jihyeon Na (president, Korean Women's Trade Union / elected deputy representative), Mingyeong Shin (president, Korean Women Workers Association at North Jeolla Province / elected deputy representative), Jin Kyung Bae (co­representative, Korean Women Workers Association / re­elected), Younok Lim (standing representative, Korean Women Workers Association / re­elected), Yuri Na (activist, Guro Educational Center for the Women Workers)



   Voilà! Let us introduce our new leaders chosen by voting in the meeting. Younok Lim and Jin Kyung Bae were re­elected as standing representative and co­representative, respectively. For the deputy representatives, we chose Jihyeon Na (chairperson, Korean Women's Trade Union) and Mingyeong Shin (president, Korean Women Workers Association at North Jeolla Province). Myeongsuk Park (president, Korean Women Workers Association at Incheon) and Seongyeop Lee (CPA) gladly accepted to serve as our new auditors. 



   Now, let us introduce our core projects for the new year! First, we would like to talk about Korea's gender wage gap, ranked the largest among the OECD countries. In order to help close this gap, based on our long­term strategy, we decided to take a variety of actions, such as strikes on International Women's Day, projects to raise minimum wage, and protests against gender earnings inequality.


   'Hatred' is a key word to interpret main social issues in Korea during the last couple of years. The less­privileged, including women and even the victims of a national tragedy became the easy targets of hatred. Especially last year in Korea, hatred for women was the subject of heated debate. Related to this debate, we remember such major issues as a murder case of a young woman at Gangnam Station and social media users' exposure of sexual  violence still rampant in various fields in Korean society. Facing these issues, Korea women do not suppress their anger any more. Now they try to make their voice heard in a whole society, seeing their everyday lives and experiences from a feminist perspective. 


   However, unfortunately, the issues of 'women's work' are not so much standing out amongst these vehement feminist debates. How could we help bridge the gap between the issues of feminism and women's work? In order to show to the public how closely these two are connected in reality, we are designing a nationwide lecturing tour and rallies to support women workers' strikes, along with a campaign named 'Math to Make a Difference'. 



To Make a Difference, Let's...

  (+) Raise the Minimum Wage / (-) Reduce the Working Hours / (÷) Share the Care Work / (×) Multiply our Respect for Labor



   In 2015, we decided to change ourselves to be an organization for our members and people, not just for our activists and projects. This is our decision to become more open to the public, instead of making one­way relationship with them. Our project 'Vision for Our Future', which we have worked on since 2015 to put this decision in action, has helped us to get a clear understanding of who we are and what we should do to better ourselves. Below are our main tasks to realize our vision for the future; more actively sharing and communicating with our members and the public, making secure our core values, and strengthening our leaders' ability. 



   To reach these goals, today we announced that we would try our best to realize our vision 'Change and Development for the Women Workers', as well as to help our activists and members educate themselves on the issues of women's work, with the help of our education committee.


   So far, we have introduced to you our leaders and plans for the new year, all decided at our 25th annual meeting for the year of 2017. We hope you'll like them. After the presidential impeachment motion was approved last December, Korean society has been in the midst of chaos. In addition, this year, we are expecting such weighty issues as the early presidential election. This is rocky time, but together, we will happily get over all these challenges!




Posted by KWWA
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