The Workplace Hierarchy That Still Haunts South Korea

Workplace bullying has its roots in the country's history of hierarchical oppression.

- Wendy Teo

It has been 10 years, but Mr Park Chang-jin still receives therapy for his trauma and suffers the occasional panic attacks where he feels like he is being choked.

Victim of the infamous Korean Airlines nut rage incident of Dec 5, 2014, Mr Park had been humiliated and assaulted, all because macadamia nuts were served in their packaging instead of on a plate to a very important passenger — the heiress to the Hanjin conglomerate that owns the airline Heather Cho.

The abuse made headlines across the world, and popularised the term gapjil, a neologism coined to describe acts of abuse of authority. Originally terms in the Korean legal lexicon, gab refers to the position of power while eul refers to the position of lower standing.

It was a long journey to justice for Mr Park, who endured even more bullying when he returned to work after the incident went public.

He was demoted, supposedly on account of his poor English proficiency, while colleagues shunned him.

A Seoul court eventually awarded Mr Park 20 million won (S$18,370) in damages in 2018, while Ms Cho spent three months in jail after an appeals court suspended her sentence.

"I faced a lot of pressure during that time, but I never wavered because I wanted to keep my dignity," Mr Park said, recalling his experience in an interview with The Straits Times. "Are such actions legal? I wanted the law to tell me."

THE GROWTH OF GAPJIL

A decade on, nothing much has changed.

Gapjil continues to be a widespread problem in South Korea, with the Korean Ministry of Employment and Labour having received more than 10,000 such complaints in 2023.

In a survey conducted among 1,000 office workers by South Korean civic group Workplace Gapjil 119 in December 2024, more than a third of the respondents said they have experienced gapjil in the preceding year.