Working (wo)man's suicide: transnational relocations of capital – repercussions for labour in South Korea and the Philippines

In South Korea, 2011 was marked by the rise of a social movement against precarity, the emergence of which was dependent upon effective and affective mobilizing strategies amongst workers. The impetus was provided by a struggle at a shipyard in Pusan, where an activist held a crane occupied for 309 days. The role of affect in constituting neoliberal workplaces has recently received much attention in anthropology. The question of how emotions figure into the mobilizing efforts of labour, rather than those of management, however, has been overlooked. Hope and despair are two emotive themes amongst activists involved in the Hanjin dispute that are closely linked to the practice of suicide amongst unionized workers in the country. Since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, suicide has also become an all‐too‐ordinary response to pressures imposed upon an increasingly precarious Korean workforce. I look into the affective mobilizing cultures that have allowed the ‘Hope Bus’ movement to excel in Korea, and explore the less successful efforts that were made by Korean and Filipino activists to link up their struggles.