Working 69 hours a week, justice can not be found in Korean movies

Some time ago, the South Korean government introduced a reform plan for a maximum working week of 69 hours, which significantly modified the maximum 52-hour working week, which caused widespread shocks in South Korean society.

The immediate background to the introduction of this reform bill is the sharp decline in the number of "long-term employees" in South Korea and the labor shortage caused by the declining birthrate. But after the plan was introduced, not only young people could not accept it, but South Korean trade unions even prepared to take President Yoon Seok-yue and others to court on the grounds of "suspected premeditated murder".

Coincidentally, there is a new film that recently focuses on the sad life of Korean professionals.

The film was screened at the Pingyao Film Festival and won Roberto Rossellini's honorary best film - "The Next Suxi".

This is director Zheng Juli's second feature film, and the last "Dao Xi Ya" was also a collaboration with Pei Douna, in which she also starred as a smiling policewoman.

However, this time the story opens from the perspective of a female high school student Suhee.

So-hee was studying at a vocational high school and was about to graduate, and was arranged by the school to intern at a telecommunications company.

On her first day on the job, she saw the crowded and dark office, the dense cubicles, and the "seniors" who received her expressionlessly like a robot, and instantly had a sense of foreboding.

This is said to be a directly operated company, but in fact, it is just a sweatshop that outsources the department.

After the intern joined, he was tricked into signing a second contract, resulting in salary and performance-related performance standards that were very difficult to meet.

In order to get a full salary, Suxi quickly entered a crazy overtime mode, working until midnight on the first day of work.

However, this kind of overtime is to complete the "internal work", so there is no overtime pay.

What makes her more uncomfortable is the work content and depressing working atmosphere.

She works in a call center that handles consumers' unsubscribe requests.

On the surface, it is to help consumers complete the unsubscribe business, but in fact, their task is to retain users, through various detour tactics to make the other party feel that unsubscribing is troublesome, so as to give up unsubscribing, and then promote other products by the way.

Each person's performance, based on how many products are sold, is ranked every week, and there is competition between different departments.

It is common for people with poor performance to be criticized in public at regular meetings, and employees at the bottom will be considered to be "dragging down the team".

As a result, employees have neither the time nor the energy to interact with each other. Everyone goes to work like machine parts, finishes KPIs, and leaves work.

So-hee soon realized that his work was nothing more than patience and repetition.

It is common to receive unsubscribe calls and promote products every day, and to be abused by users as a gas cylinder, but this patience does not lead to any growth, but only wears down her energy and angularity, making her lose herself more and more.

It didn't take long for Suxi to think of leaving.

But the seniors around her told her that society is like this; The school teacher pressed her bitterly, and if she did not do well, it would discredit the school.

Under all kinds of PUA, Suxi tried his best to put the performance together.

It turned out that the company not only defaulted on bonuses, but also underpaid wages...

Because of grievances and anger, she confronted a customer who was looking for fault.

I thought that the team leader would blame her for this, but the other party just quietly comforted her and said, "It's your bad luck, it's stalled", and gave her a holiday that night, asking her to leave work early to go to a party with friends.

The next day, she found the group leader committing suicide in the car.

The suicide note was affixed to the car glass, and it wrote all the things about the oppression of employees that he had witnessed and experienced since he joined the company.

It turned out that the team leader who had been PUA and worked hard for them had long been overwhelmed, and could not accept his role from victim to perpetrator, so he could only be freed from death and wrote a suicide note in the style of a report letter.

Within days, however, all employees, including Suhee, received a letter of commitment.

The company made it conditional on giving bonuses and asked everyone to keep silent about what was written in the suicide note.

This incident brought a great mental blow to Suxi.

Because she couldn't see a way out, she finally passed away quietly like a team leader...

The narrative mode of the film does not fall into place, and suddenly switches perspectives in the middle section, and the protagonist becomes Youzhen, a criminal police officer who investigates the cause of Suhee's death.

Suxi died in Shenhu, and after the police found the body, they only needed to simply visit the investigation to confirm that there was no doubt to close the case by suicide.

However, Youzhen pieced together her painful experience from Suhee's family, friends, teachers, and colleagues, and also found the letter of report that was determined to die but was quietly suppressed.

She believes that this "suicide" is caused by social coercion, the company's practice has violated the law, and the school's education has obviously gone wrong, and there is not only one "Suxi".

So, she is very persistent in seeking justice for the dead Suhee.

She approached the telecommunications company where Suhee worked, only to find that the employees here were silent about her death and that of her team leader.

On the surface, the company's senior management cooperated with her investigation, but pretended to be a victim, and picked up Suxi's family background and personal experience, implying that she committed suicide because of mental illness, which not only had nothing to do with the company, but also had a negative impact on the company's reputation.

When Youzhen asked if there were any cases of unpaid overtime and wage deductions, they took out the set of prevarication of PUA newcomer employees and told her that these things were also from the labor bureau.

You really can't figure out why Suxi chose to commit suicide instead of leaving his job, even if he was treated unfairly.

So I contacted Suxi's friends and colleagues, and found that the friend who chose to leave has not looked for a second job so far, but relies on online food broadcasts to support himself;

Colleagues told her that if she was fired from the company during her internship or left to return to school, she would be required to wear a red name tag as a punishment for reducing the employment rate.

Until they find work again, these name-tagged students live a life of discrimination at school.

This is done not only in their schools, but also in almost all vocational high schools.

Youzhen found the school and the Department of Education all the way, and found that when the school arranged the employment of students, it would not consider whether the position was suitable at all, Suxi was sent to the telecommunications company is already good, and many of her classmates were sent to the feed factory;

And the Ministry of Education will not supervise these phenomena, let alone how these students are treated when they are sent to the factory, they only know that if the employment rate is not qualified, the school will not be able to operate, and the subsidies received by the Education Department are also linked to the employment rate.

Even if you find the Ministry of Education further up, it will not help.

Things have developed to this point, Youzhen understands where Suhee's despair comes from, not that she has encountered a black-hearted enterprise, not that the team leader said, "You are unlucky, you are on the stall", but no matter how she chooses, she cannot escape from this systematic oppression.

The leader of the suicide group is "the previous Suxi", and the "next Suxi" in the title is a general reference, which may be her colleague or her junior brother and sister.

Even Youzhen is the same, the film uses the portrayal of dragonflies and water to present her survival in the police station. The reason why she is so attentive to Suhee's case is that in addition to her instinctive sense of justice, there is also a trace of sad empathy.

The female policewoman in the film, Youzhen, is an extremely idealistic person. Everything she did was extraordinary, and she even offended her superiors and threatened her career by insisting on seeking justice for So-hee and her co-workers.

Such idealism is not common in reality, but even if such a person appears, even if she has extraordinary determination and first-class action, she still cannot change anything. This is the most heartbreaking part of the whole story.

At the end of the film, the curtain ended silently, just like the death of Pixel Xi and the group leader.

This is the melancholic core that the film wants to truly express through a dual-perspective narrative.

The bad guys can be revenged, the evil forces can be defeated, but in the face of structural social ills, justice can not be found in Korean movies.