[Inside Chodong]A Country Without Another Sohee

"Can I quit my job?" The young-faced daughter, riding in a car with her mom and dad, throws out the question in a whining tone. After a few seconds of awkward silence, the mother asks, "What did you say?" and the daughter mutters to herself, "You heard it but pretended not to..."

This is a scene from director Jung Joo-ri's film Next Sohee, which was the closing film of the Critics' Week at last year's Cannes Film Festival?the first Korean film to achieve this. Sohee, a high school senior in a vocational school, was on her way home from the hospital after waking up from a suicide attempt that day. She couldn't bring herself to say that work was too hard, so she used the excuse of heavy drinking, but after much deliberation, she finally revealed her true feelings. Her parents, struggling financially, tried to brush it off.

Neither the teachers at school, the supervisors at work, nor the parents?none of the adults around Sohee?stood up for her. Thrown into a blind spot of human rights protection and legal compliance due to her student status, Sohee and countless others like her are driven to exhaustion as cheap labor, pressured only to endure and produce greater results.

The child sent out a distress signal with all her might, but the signal was not received, and the rescue ultimately failed. Although she majored in pet care, she was sent to a call center for her internship, where she suffered from emotional labor and wage exploitation. When the student committed suicide, the company, school, Ministry of Labor, and Office of Education focused only on employment rates, performance, and incentives, shouting "This is reality" and "It can't be helped," refusing to take responsibility.

Detective Oh Yoo-jin, investigating Sohee's death, vents her frustration at irresponsible managers, poor companies, and incompetent national systems, saying, "It would be nice if people were respected for doing hard work, but they get looked down on even more for doing that kind of work. Nobody cares," delivering a harsh critique of the "it can't be helped" Korean society. As Sohee's dance moves, passionately performed without compensation, play on the big screen for several minutes in a cellphone video left like a suicide note, the heart feels heavy. Even tears of catharsis seem like a luxury.

The film Next Sohee is based on the true story of the death of an LG Uplus call center intern in January 2017, and it has become a hot topic with rave reviews at overseas film festivals and group viewings by labor and political organizations. Perhaps influenced by this, the amendment to the Act on the Promotion of Vocational Education and Training (VocEd Act), which had not been reviewed even once in the National Assembly's standing committee for over a year since its proposal, passed the Education Committee's bill review subcommittee on the 22nd with bipartisan agreement.

Under the existing VocEd Act, vocational high school interns were only protected by certain provisions of the Labor Standards Act, such as Article 65, which prohibits employing persons under 18 in morally or health-wise harmful or dangerous work; Article 54, which mandates at least 30 minutes of rest for 4-hour shifts and at least 1 hour for 8-hour shifts; Article 73 on menstrual leave; and Article 72 banning underground work.

With the newly passed amendment, the scope of the Labor Standards Act's application has expanded, prohibiting forced labor, assault, middleman exploitation, and workplace harassment against interns. It also forbids assigning tasks unrelated to skill acquisition. It is regrettable that these protections, which should have been in place long ago, are only now being legally enforced in the current Korean labor reality. As long as Next Sohee does not disappear, the government's pledge to open the era of $40,000 per capita income by 2027 is meaningless.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.