Is Real Korean Movie On Netflix

[Victoria Steigerwald]

Thelead character in the netflix hit Squid Game is a laid-off union auto worker whose story is based on a real-life struggle: the 2009 SsangYong Motors strike, which ended in violent defeat when hundreds of rampaging police charged into the factory and brutally beat down the striking workers. Photo from IMDB.

As a SsangYong striker, Seong saw his co-worker beaten to death by police. These events ultimately led him to lose his job and his future prospects and end up divorced, losing custody of his daughter.

Squid Game imagines how such brutal events might lead desperate workers to wager their very lives on a chance at economic redemption. This fantastical vision of wretched worker suicide struggles is, in fact, rooted in reality.

The real-life 77-day SsangYong strike resulted when the company unexpectedly laid off 43 percent of its entire workforce (2,646 workers) to facilitate a profit-driven transfer of its assets to global investors; the company was purchased by a Chinese company, Shanghai Motors, and then purchased again by an Indian company, Mahindra & Mahindra.

But the series also presents possibilities of redemption through solidarity among the poor. Many competitors in the Squid Game series are only out to save themselves (such as the greedy gangster and the amoral stockbroker); others turn to prayer, which does not save them. But in the end, the characters who show solidarity for the suffering of others and who sacrifice themselves to save others are the only ones who transcend the horrifying game with dignity; one even survives.

Minsun Ji is the founder of a popular education consulting company, Labor Coop Connections. She was a union organizer, a founder of a worker center (El Centro Humanitario) in Denver, and the director of a graduate program, the Center for New Directions in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Colorado Denver.

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