A webtoon, a drama, and a reader who had not been paying attention

The notes follow the webtoon Songgot, also made not long before, they write, as a JTBC drama. The writer had little interest in webtoons or television drama, until the first episode of Songgot caught them, and they read the whole series through. Comments under the work, they say, are best called a desperate fellow-feeling. People living in an unreasonable social structure felt the story keenly; the writer, who had had little interest in irregular work or in unions, found themselves thinking hard as well.

The assignment, as the notes record it, was to read the webtoon or watch one or more episodes of the drama, tell the story and what it made one feel, and, if useful, write as if one were the bookkeeper in a father’s firm. This reading stays with that frame, and does not invent character names the unique does not give.

Beside Misaeng, and a title like an awl

Why the work, though so many people felt it, made less of a stir than expected is a question the writer turns over. Set beside Misaeng, which not long before had treated a similar kind of material and become a topic, Songgot may have met some unseen outward pressure; or people may simply have found it harder to step into the lives it shows. Misaeng, they write, told the hardships of office workers in a weaker position at small and large firms. Songgot tells the lives of irregular supermarket workers, or of labourers in still harsher conditions.

The title Songgot — an awl — was chosen, they write, because the work stabs, without mercy and in a factual way, at a place in society that is already very sore. It shows the social facts neither more nor less than they are. Its main subject is the lives of the weak, but it does not take only their side, nor defend everything they do; it lights both the merits and the shadows of a union, and so they call it a necessary mirror. Even a person in a stronger position, they write, if they are a person, should feel a just anger rise; the work is sharp, factual, and deserves high praise.

Irregular work, a union, and a line about not stepping in

A portal’s definition of irregular work, as they quote it, is a post or a job that is not guaranteed as regular work is, in the manner and length of the labour and in the continuity of employment — contract, temporary, day labour, and the like. In a word, they write, it is a temporary workplace in which one does not know when one may be dismissed, and lives day to day. Said so briefly, the seriousness may not be felt; until Songgot, the writer felt the same. News and articles spoke constantly of irregular work, unions, strikes, and demonstrations, but without a personal interest one treated it as something that had simply happened.

A line in Songgot, they write, says that people do not step in when a matter is not their own — even if it may be their experience later. Korea, they add, has long had a controversy over irregular work, and the labour market has been unstable because of it. Looked at closely, what had seemed only a temporary job without guarantees was something harsher: belonging in several places and in none, with no clear place to feel one belongs, to be protected, or to ask for a just right. A labour union, they write, was made to stand against that, and society sometimes looks at it askance. What a union asks, they say, is just, and ought to be respected; a single voice crying out alone can do nothing. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of the webtoon Songgot: irregular work, a union’s two sides, and a comparison with Misaeng.

Last updated: 15 November 2026