[100 Years Ago Today] October 8, 1925 – Wonsan’s Dockworkers Raise a New Union Banner as Seoul’s Census Enters Its Second Week

Wonsan had been an open port since 1880, and its docks had long been a cradle of Korean labor organizing. The Wonsan Labor Society, founded in 1921, had brought together the men who carried grain sacks on their backs and the men who hauled ropes on incoming ships. This October, the society resolved to reorganize itself into seven distinct trade unions — covering everything from cargo weighing to shipping and portage — with plans to merge them the following month into the Wonsan Federation of Labor.Elsewhere, printers in Pyongyang, Seoul, and Busan had struck one after another, giving rise to the All-Korea Federation of Printing Workers. Records show fifty-five separate strikes across the peninsula in 1925 alone. On the docks, in print shops, and on factory floors, Koreans were finding organized ways to be heard.Meanwhile, in Seoul, results from the simplified national census — conducted at midnight on October 1 under Government-General Ordinance No. 66 — were still being announced: a total population of 19,522,945. In the flood-ravaged Ichon-dong district, reconstruction remained unfinished.

In Shanghai, the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea had a new leader. President Park Eun-sik had stepped down that summer, recommending Yi Sang-ryong as his successor; Yi was inaugurated on September 24 as the government’s first Prime Minister-Premier (Gukmuryeong). Word reached Wonsan that Park’s health was visibly declining. In Manchuria, tension was quietly building around General Guo Songling, a commander under warlord Zhang Zuolin — unrest that would erupt into open mutiny within weeks.

In Switzerland, the Locarno Conference — convened three days earlier — was in full session. Germany’s Gustav Stresemann, France’s Aristide Briand, and Britain’s Austen Chamberlain sat across the table negotiating a mutual guarantee of Western Europe’s borders, talks that would run until October 16. In northern Morocco, Spanish troops, having seized Rif leader Abd el-Krim’s headquarters at Ajdir six days before, were expanding operations to pacify the surrounding territory.

Wonsan’s dockworkers were not alone in learning to organize under foreign rule. In Morocco, Abd el-Krim’s Rif Republic had shown that colonized peoples could build their own institutions of resistance, even as Spanish and French forces closed in that same autumn. In Ireland, dockers and transport workers had spent the early 1920s building the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union into a force strong enough to shape the new Free State’s politics. Across the colonized world, the docks — where goods moved but wages stayed low — were proving to be one of the first places where ordinary workers discovered collective leverage.

Born in 1858 into a scholarly family in Andong, Yi Sang-ryong had once studied Confucian classics in the ancestral home of Imcheonggak. After Korea’s annexation, he moved his entire household to southern Manchuria, converted family land into resources for the independence movement, and by 1919 headed the Seoro-gunjeongseo, an armed independence organization in western Manchuria. On September 24, 1925 — just two weeks before this Thursday — he was inaugurated in Shanghai as the Provisional Government’s first Gukmuryeong. He would resign the following January, unable to assemble a cabinet amid factional strife, and return once more to Manchuria to keep working toward unity among Korea’s scattered armed resistance groups.

Before dawn on Wonsan’s docks, the mist had not yet lifted when porters gathered, bags already on their backs, to unload grain and dried fish from newly arrived ships. By midday, men crowded into the labor society’s meeting room, debating unfamiliar union terms — “cargo weighing,” “portage,” “shipping” — but united in purpose. By evening, printers gathered in the town’s print shops to trade news of the new federation forming in Seoul. When night fell, only the harbor lights remained, marking the end of another working day.

A century ago, a Wonsan dockworker carried cargo on his back from dawn until night for wages that varied by the day — precisely why organizing into unions felt so urgent. Today, container cranes run around the clock at Busan and Incheon, operated by workers wearing hard hats and reading screens instead of shouldering sacks. In a hundred years, the load moved from human backs to machines, and scattered voices found a home in labor law.