More Green Shits.
The green shit is really starting to pile up, both here and overseas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/asia/07pride.html?_r=1&hp
With Wounded Pride, Unemployed Koreans Quietly Turn to Manual Labor
Former white-collar workers have joined the fishermen working in Buan, on the west coast of South Korea.
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: July 6, 2009
KUNGHANG, South Korea â With his clean white university sweatshirt and shiny cellphone, Lee Chang-shik looks the part of a manager at a condominium development company, the job that he held until last yearâs financial panic â and the one he tells his friends and family he still holds.
But in fact, he leads a secret life. After his company went bankrupt late last year, he recently relocated to this remote fishing village to do the highest-paying work he could find in the current market: as a hand on a crab boat.
âI definitely donât put crab fisherman on my résumé,â said Mr. Lee, 33, who makes the five-hour drive back to Seoul once a month to hunt for a desk job. âThis work hurts my pride.â
Tales of the downwardly mobile have become common during the current financial crisis, and South Korea has had more than its share since the global downturn hammered this once fast-growing export economy. But they often have a distinctly Korean twist, with former white-collar workers going into more physically demanding work or traditional kinds of manual labor that are relatively well paid here â from farming and fishing to the professional back-scrubbers who clean patrons at the nationâs numerous public bathhouses.
Just as distinctly Korean may be the lengths to which some go to hide their newly humble status.
Mr. Lee says he carefully avoids the topic of work in phone conversations with friends and his parents, and dodges invitations to meet by claiming he is too busy. He gave his name with great reluctance, and only after being assured the article would not appear in Korean.
Another former white-collar worker who now works on a crab boat in the same village said he could not tell family and friends, and told his wife only via e-mail after arriving here. Yet another tells his parents that he is in Japan.
In a competitive, status-conscious society, these and other workers say they feel intense shame doing manual work. Some also say they feel guilty working such rough jobs after years of expensive cram schools and college. And many younger workers, having grown up in an increasingly affluent nation, consider physical labor a part of the bygone, impoverished eras of their parents and grandparents.
âThese days, many South Koreans think they have the right to be white collar,â said Lee Byung-hee, senior economist at the Korea Labor Institute, a government-linked research organization based in Seoul. âBut their expectations hit the dark reality of this economy, where people have no choice but to go into the blue-collar work force.â
Labor experts say the number of former office workers who are moving into blue-collar jobs has increased as South Korea has suffered its worst unemployment since the 1997 Asian currency crisis. According to the National Statistical Office, the unemployment rate has risen to 3.8 percent â low by American standards, but high for this Asian economic powerhouse.
Many of the unemployed can rely on traditional forms of economic support, like living with family. And despite the slowdown, jobs are still to be found in this prosperous society, where the neon-lit bustle of cities like Seoul has not missed a beat.
Still, Jeong Seung-beom, whose small Seoul-based firm helps recruit workers for South Koreaâs fishing industry, says that this year is the busiest he has seen, even better than 1997, when white-collar workers also flooded his office.
He said his company, the Sea Job Placement Center, now places about 80 people a month, four times the number a year ago. Mr. Jeong said most of the new recruits were laid-off office workers or university students who could no longer afford tuition. Many of the newcomers are so woefully unprepared for the physical demands of fishing, he said, he tries to scare them during orientation sessions.
On a recent morning in his cramped office, six young men showed up with gym bags, ready to make the trip to Kunghang, near the nationâs southwest tip. Among them was Mr. Lee, the former condominium developer.
Laid-off workers were hired as fishermen in Kunghang.
Mr. Jeong warned them that they might get seasick or homesick, or even be injured or killed on the crab boats, which can spend 14 hours a day at sea. When he paused for questions, one man in his 20s asked if he could go home during holidays.
âCrabs donât take holidays,â Mr. Jeong scoffed.
Undaunted, all six went to Kunghang later that day.
Mr. Lee said he decided to fish because he could make about $1,700 a month, much more than he could earn in Seoul pouring lattes or busing tables. The high salaries stem from the chronic labor shortages in these occupations during the boom years when South Koreans shunned them as too dirty, leaving them to Asian migrant laborers.
Another allure is that many of these menial jobs seem to be recession-proof, workers and labor experts say.
Na Deuk-won, who owns a school in Seoul that trains back-scrubbers and bathhouse masseuses, says enrollment has jumped 50 percent this year, to 180 students, because of a sudden influx of university graduates and laid-off office workers.
âEven in a recession, people need their back scrubbed,â Mr. Na said.
At his Dongdaemun Bath Academy, students gathered in a tiled shower room to learn how to scrub naked customers with a pair of sponge mitts. One, Hyun Sung-chul, 48, said he had been supervising 50 workers as a manager at a construction company before losing his job in January.
At first, he said, he hid his enrollment in scrubbing school from family and friends, though he told his wife. When he finally confided about his career change to a friend, he was surprised when the friend confessed interest as well.
âHe told me, âTeach me when I get fired, too!â â Mr. Hyun said. âI think people come into this field only when they are afraid that their livelihood is at risk.â
In Kunghang, many of the new crab fishermen recruited by Mr. Jeong expressed regrets about their choice.
âThis is so smelly and dirty, it makes me want to vomit,â Kwak Jung-ho, 33, a branch manager of a cellphone store in Seoul before it closed this year, said as he cut tangled crabs out of a net.
âIf my parents knew what I was doing now, they would pity me,â he said. âNow, I look at the ocean and think, I should have worked harder at the cellphone store, and be a better man for my family.â
The green shit is really starting to pile up, both here and overseas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/asia/07pride.html?_r=1&hp
With Wounded Pride, Unemployed Koreans Quietly Turn to Manual Labor
Former white-collar workers have joined the fishermen working in Buan, on the west coast of South Korea.
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: July 6, 2009
KUNGHANG, South Korea â With his clean white university sweatshirt and shiny cellphone, Lee Chang-shik looks the part of a manager at a condominium development company, the job that he held until last yearâs financial panic â and the one he tells his friends and family he still holds.
But in fact, he leads a secret life. After his company went bankrupt late last year, he recently relocated to this remote fishing village to do the highest-paying work he could find in the current market: as a hand on a crab boat.
âI definitely donât put crab fisherman on my résumé,â said Mr. Lee, 33, who makes the five-hour drive back to Seoul once a month to hunt for a desk job. âThis work hurts my pride.â
Tales of the downwardly mobile have become common during the current financial crisis, and South Korea has had more than its share since the global downturn hammered this once fast-growing export economy. But they often have a distinctly Korean twist, with former white-collar workers going into more physically demanding work or traditional kinds of manual labor that are relatively well paid here â from farming and fishing to the professional back-scrubbers who clean patrons at the nationâs numerous public bathhouses.
Just as distinctly Korean may be the lengths to which some go to hide their newly humble status.
Mr. Lee says he carefully avoids the topic of work in phone conversations with friends and his parents, and dodges invitations to meet by claiming he is too busy. He gave his name with great reluctance, and only after being assured the article would not appear in Korean.
Another former white-collar worker who now works on a crab boat in the same village said he could not tell family and friends, and told his wife only via e-mail after arriving here. Yet another tells his parents that he is in Japan.
In a competitive, status-conscious society, these and other workers say they feel intense shame doing manual work. Some also say they feel guilty working such rough jobs after years of expensive cram schools and college. And many younger workers, having grown up in an increasingly affluent nation, consider physical labor a part of the bygone, impoverished eras of their parents and grandparents.
âThese days, many South Koreans think they have the right to be white collar,â said Lee Byung-hee, senior economist at the Korea Labor Institute, a government-linked research organization based in Seoul. âBut their expectations hit the dark reality of this economy, where people have no choice but to go into the blue-collar work force.â
Labor experts say the number of former office workers who are moving into blue-collar jobs has increased as South Korea has suffered its worst unemployment since the 1997 Asian currency crisis. According to the National Statistical Office, the unemployment rate has risen to 3.8 percent â low by American standards, but high for this Asian economic powerhouse.
Many of the unemployed can rely on traditional forms of economic support, like living with family. And despite the slowdown, jobs are still to be found in this prosperous society, where the neon-lit bustle of cities like Seoul has not missed a beat.
Still, Jeong Seung-beom, whose small Seoul-based firm helps recruit workers for South Koreaâs fishing industry, says that this year is the busiest he has seen, even better than 1997, when white-collar workers also flooded his office.
He said his company, the Sea Job Placement Center, now places about 80 people a month, four times the number a year ago. Mr. Jeong said most of the new recruits were laid-off office workers or university students who could no longer afford tuition. Many of the newcomers are so woefully unprepared for the physical demands of fishing, he said, he tries to scare them during orientation sessions.
On a recent morning in his cramped office, six young men showed up with gym bags, ready to make the trip to Kunghang, near the nationâs southwest tip. Among them was Mr. Lee, the former condominium developer.
Laid-off workers were hired as fishermen in Kunghang.
Mr. Jeong warned them that they might get seasick or homesick, or even be injured or killed on the crab boats, which can spend 14 hours a day at sea. When he paused for questions, one man in his 20s asked if he could go home during holidays.
âCrabs donât take holidays,â Mr. Jeong scoffed.
Undaunted, all six went to Kunghang later that day.
Mr. Lee said he decided to fish because he could make about $1,700 a month, much more than he could earn in Seoul pouring lattes or busing tables. The high salaries stem from the chronic labor shortages in these occupations during the boom years when South Koreans shunned them as too dirty, leaving them to Asian migrant laborers.
Another allure is that many of these menial jobs seem to be recession-proof, workers and labor experts say.
Na Deuk-won, who owns a school in Seoul that trains back-scrubbers and bathhouse masseuses, says enrollment has jumped 50 percent this year, to 180 students, because of a sudden influx of university graduates and laid-off office workers.
âEven in a recession, people need their back scrubbed,â Mr. Na said.
At his Dongdaemun Bath Academy, students gathered in a tiled shower room to learn how to scrub naked customers with a pair of sponge mitts. One, Hyun Sung-chul, 48, said he had been supervising 50 workers as a manager at a construction company before losing his job in January.
At first, he said, he hid his enrollment in scrubbing school from family and friends, though he told his wife. When he finally confided about his career change to a friend, he was surprised when the friend confessed interest as well.
âHe told me, âTeach me when I get fired, too!â â Mr. Hyun said. âI think people come into this field only when they are afraid that their livelihood is at risk.â
In Kunghang, many of the new crab fishermen recruited by Mr. Jeong expressed regrets about their choice.
âThis is so smelly and dirty, it makes me want to vomit,â Kwak Jung-ho, 33, a branch manager of a cellphone store in Seoul before it closed this year, said as he cut tangled crabs out of a net.
âIf my parents knew what I was doing now, they would pity me,â he said. âNow, I look at the ocean and think, I should have worked harder at the cellphone store, and be a better man for my family.â
