My Alba
Work Story: Requirements that aren’t written in labor contracts
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By Kim Ha-rin
Published Jul. 29, 2017
Translated by Marilyn
Hook
※
Editor’s note: Ilda is recording the real experiences of young women doing alba [part-time, temporary, or side]
work. The “My Alba Work Story” series
receives funding from the Korea Press Foundation’s Press Promotion Fund.
At a bakery alba job, feeling on
display like a pastry
After the time in middle school when I was too young to get a real alba job and so sadly had to post
hundreds of flyers around apartment complexes, I became an adult and could do alba at a variety of places. I’m very
good at everything I’ve tried, so I’ve always become close to the business
owner or manager and have been offered a lot of promotions – but in the end, I
always have no choice but to quit. My socially-assigned gender, the fact that I
was a woman just won’t let me be.
The first place I worked as an adult was a bakery near Mapo Station.
During the day, the area was a high-class place with tall buildings and hotels,
but in the evening the lights of the room salons shone brightly. And the bakery
I worked at was right in the middle of them. I thought that I all I would do
was ring up and package the baked goods that customers brought to the counter,
but I forgot one important fact: people, myself included, seek out bakeries
when they’re drunk.
Drunk middle-aged men came in every day. From the moment they entered,
they used informal speech without fail, often called us things like “girls”, “eonni”, and “Miss Kim”, and sometimes
critiqued our looks, gave us life advice, and even sexually harassed us. Most
of them misunderstood that buying baked goods meant they were also buying the
employees’ emotional labor and smiles, and the right to sexually harass them.
“Pretty girl, why aren’t you smiling? You have to smile while you work,” “How
old are you? Where do you live? Why are you working here? You should be
studying,” “Want me to help you get another job?”, “I want the prettiest girl
to come over here! Pick out a cake as pretty as your face”... It was as if I
was also one of the goods on sale.
It was hard to fight back against sexual harassment that flashed by like
lightning. When I heard those kinds of comments, I wouldn’t understand the
intent for a few seconds. By the time I did, it was too late to respond. And if
I called that customer back and stood up for myself, what would happen to my
job? How would I get by next month? What if the customer hit me right there?
What if he waited outside for me to finish work and then harassed me? I don’t
think there are many people who could ignore such worries and bravely say, “Excuse
me, what did you just say? Apologize to me.” Sadly, I couldn’t report the
sexual harassment I suffered from customers.
With sexual harassment by coworkers, the problem is gender-based power
 |
| Me in
the uniform I would wear at the fast food restaurant. ⓒ Kim Ha-rin |
I got tired of the emotional labor at the bakery and started looking for
another job. I found one at a fast food restaurant in which I would only have
to work in the kitchen. Because the managers were aware that if they sent me to
the counter I wouldn’t do an ounce of emotional labor for the customers, I was
pretty much able to stay at my grill. It was fast and tiring work, but I
thought it would be perfect for me because I wouldn’t have to do emotional
labor or suffer sexual harassment from customers. But it turned out not to
matter that I could avoid the customers - I still had male coworkers to deal
with.
There weren’t many male employees, but they made their presence felt disproportionately.
They traded sexual jokes and formed a tight men-only alliance while disparaging
their female coworkers. “I want to put her face in an oil drum”, “Is your arm
fat real? How can there be so much of it?”, “You have to wear makeup if you want
to drive men crazy”, “Guys don’t like it if girls are too skinny, like you”,
etc. They had a good command of a quite
a range of stereotypical misogynist language, including verbal abuse,
appearance-related insults, and sexually-harassing comments. They would even
say, “It was a joke, why are you being so serious?” if I got angry – they were
really the stereotypical examples of male entitlement found in classic feminist
books.
At the bakery, customers had treated me like a product they could buy, and
it wasn’t very different here. I realized that men already think of women as
products that they can buy and possess, as objects that they can critique as
they please and do whatever else they want with. The power differential between
customers and alba workers wasn’t the
only problem.
Once, I went drinking with my coworkers. One of the people there was a guy
who usually made a lot of misogynistic remarks, and this day was no different -
a real festival of drivel from the start. “A woman’s age is like a Christmas
cake, you know. I’m not just saying that, it’s been scientifically proven. Once
a woman is past 25 [in Korean age], she ages suddenly and her personality gets
weird. You guys don’t have much time left.” I never would have dreamed that, in
the 21st century, I would hear in real life the classic misogynistic
remarks I’d read in books.
I was furious and yelled, “What the hell is wrong with you?” But the other
women at the table agreed with him: “That’s right. People say that women start
to wither when they turn 25. So we have to get married soon...” My anger turned
to misery. I realized, with desperation, that society hadn’t changed as much as
I’d thought and that it wouldn’t do so easily now, either.
 |
| My night out with my coworkers was a festival of classic misogynistic remarks. |
As we were all leaving that night, that man used his drunkenness as an
excuse to touch me and put his arms around me. Even though we were on a busy
Hongdae street and my other coworkers could see what was happening, no one
tried to stop him. Finally, I shouted at him right there on the street. And I
yelled at my other coworkers for not restraining him. My handsy coworker said
he was just drunk and asked why I was being so sensitive. The others were angry
at me for not somehow preventing the whole thing. I still think of that night
sometimes. Was I being overly sensitive? Did I overreact, should I just have
firmly refused him at the start… these kinds of thoughts gnaw at me.
I think that if I had been a regular worker, I could have reported that
coworker for sexual harassment. But I was an alba worker, and in a society that makes people embarrassed to do alba, I thought that the system to
handle that kind of complaint only applied to “real” workers at big companies.
Also, I couldn’t imagine talking to the manager about it because he was close
with the harasser, and I didn’t have any evidence. I felt he would probably
blame me instead, saying that I shouldn’t drag something that happened in my
private life into the workplace. As our sexual harassment prevention “training”
consisted of signing a paper, I didn’t know who I could ask for help, or
how.
I had to make a living, I wouldn’t be able to find another job
immediately, and I didn’t want to throw away the effort I had put into becoming
good at my job, so I didn’t want to quit. And more than anything, I felt that I
shouldn’t have to leave because I hadn’t done anything wrong. But my physical
and mental condition deteriorated, and I got through the days by taking
depression medication. After slowly crumbling like this for a while, one day
when I found myself working with my harasser, I suddenly burst in tears.
I left work early that day, and when I got home, I called work and told
them I quit. I’d tried to endure the situation but couldn’t. My friends said
what had happened wasn’t my fault, and I knew that, too, so I couldn’t
understand why I was the only one suffering. I learned that in this society,
it’s not the wrongdoer but the person who’s been hurt and can’t stand it who
ends up leaving. When I quit, the people that I told about it asked why I was
quitting over “such a small problem”. I also heard that the manager who was
friendly with my harasser was going around saying that I must have come on to
him.
In this way, that incident took away the job in which I’d been sharpening
my skills, my workplace relationships, and my health. Workplace sexual
harassment as I’d understood it was something that took place in an office, and
was committed by a boss abusing his authority. I had no idea I’d encounter it
in an alba workplace at the hands of
a coworker. He wasn’t my boss, but he was a man. I realized that workplace
sexual harassment isn’t based just on positional authority but also on
gender-based power. Even between alba
workers at the same level, there is a huge gender-based power difference.
Unprotected and invisible female alba
workers
Wanting to kill that man, wanting to die, blaming myself, comforting
myself – somehow I overcame all these feelings, picked myself back up, and went
through several more alba jobs. Now,
I’m working at a sex toy shop. The work has been easier than I thought because
customers tend to be shy when they come in – except foreigners. Groups of male
tourists often see the “sex shop” sign as they pass by and come in snickering,
and 10 times out of 10, they engage in sexual harassment. Maybe they get the
courage to harass the shop’s workers because they’re in a group, or maybe they
think that we’ll put up with sexual jokes because we work at a sex toy shop.
Probably both.
From flabbergasting comments like “If we give you money, will you put on a
sexy show?”, to suggestively moving their lower halves, asking if that is the
kind of sex that the shop’s sign refers to, and giggling among themselves. They
even sometimes ask if we have sex for money, and if not, if we know any places
nearby that do sell sex. I got so angry that I put up some notices. They say
that sexual harassment, molestation, and assault will be dealt with through the
justice system, and that we are not a sex trade establishment so they should
not ask us about that.
 |
| The sign I made and posted myself in the sex toy shop. |
When I’d told the store owner that we were having those kinds of problems,
he said it was unavoidable. When I put up the sign, he fretted that it would
scare away customers. And he told me, as if he were giving me life advice, that
I needed to learn how to laugh off all types of situations. It’s a business
owner’s duty to ensure the safety of their workers, but far from voluntarily
protecting us or even supporting our efforts to protect ourselves, our boss was
working against us. Because he hadn’t experienced it, he didn’t think it was
threatening, didn’t even recognize it as a problem. I realized that this was
how the problems that female alba
workers face have been continually erased.
The threats, fear, and hardships that we endure in our everyday lives as
women also exist in alba work.
Socially, both alba work and women’s
work are neglected, which means that the lives of female alba workers are largely ignored and the difficulties we face are
not taken seriously.
I’ve had to smile and do emotional labor that wasn’t in my labor contract,
and I’ve often been treated like a product in a display. Tolerating the abuse
coming at me from customers and coworkers, conquering my self-blame, and
keeping myself from crumbling never seems to get any easier.
I don’t want to live a
life of enduring things anymore. I want to stop being a target who’s always on
the defensive and become an active agent living a new life. To be honest, while
writing this article, I started to feel like I was just listing all the things
I’ve been through, and it made me feel powerless for a minute. But then I felt
hope that writing it is one way of becoming an active agent – maybe this
article will become a kind of testimony that can awaken awareness or sympathy
in others.
*Original article: http://ildaro.com/sub_read.html?uid=7950
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