[Slate] Printed Humans: Workers Outside Social Security

Director Bong Joon-ho's New Film "Mickey 17"
Labor Rights Treated as Secondary Explored
Coexistence with Alien Lifeforms Suggested as Key to Improvement

Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey 7 is set in the distant future. The protagonist, Mickey, is a historian, but in this era, history is revered. He lives on the planet Midgard but loses money through sports gambling and ends up joining the clone project called "Expendable."

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The film adaptation, Mickey 17, moves the timeline forward to 2054. The reason Mickey (Robert Pattinson) volunteers for Expendable is also changed. After a macaron shop he started with his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) fails, leaving them with huge debts, they decide to flee Earth. To board an exploration ship that pioneers new territories, one must have special skills or talents. Lacking any particular abilities, Mickey volunteers for Expendable, which has almost no screening process.

Expendable involves being sent on the most dangerous missions, repeatedly facing death. For example, they physically verify how much radiation exposure causes death or whether a new planet’s atmosphere contains viruses. Based on this, the scientists on the exploration ship devise preventive measures, and Mickey’s memories and biological data are uploaded into a new body, which is printed and sent back to the brutal field.

Mickey is coerced into service and sacrifice with phrases like, "Every time you die, we learn something new, and humanity progresses." The logic that other values can be sacrificed for a superior cause is not unfamiliar. This can be easily found in South Korea, where 7.5 million workers are excluded from labor standards laws and social security. Citizenship rights are not guaranteed enough for relative deprivation to become normalized. In a reality where property rights take precedence, basic labor rights are treated as secondary. Institutional discrimination is tolerated through legal exceptions or absence of rights.

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This problem remains unchanged even when industrial accidents occur. In fact, the scope of industrial accidents is expanding in various forms. There are repeated industrial accident deaths among subcontracted workers within the same company. Kim Jong-jin, senior research fellow at the Korea Labor and Society Institute, pointed out in his book Workers’ Time Does Not Flow Automatically the following: "Our society has long allowed companies to be in a stronger position than workers and has neglected prevention and management costs, leading companies to believe it is more advantageous to drag out legal proceedings after industrial accidents occur."

Director Bong Joon-ho focused on the original concept of human printing for this reason. He said, "In recent years, there have been consecutive deaths of workers at thermal power plants, screen doors, and bakeries," adding, "In the film, Mickey does all this alone, but in reality, it’s person A, then person B, then person C, continuously." He emphasized, "It is necessary to reflect on our current reality through the sci-fi genre, which reveals our situation as starkly as possible, if not more so than reality itself."

In the film, he points to the coexistence with the "Creepers" as the key to changing the labor environment. Although perceived as threats to humans, they are indigenous lifeforms of the Niflheim planet that saved Mickey from freezing to death and possess remarkable intelligence. Unlike humans who ignore Mickey’s death, they act collectively to save their young. They recognize cries from afar, and thousands rush to the scene.

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The starting point for resolving labor inequality is to listen more to the voices of those deprived of them. When society is ready to listen and they can finally speak about their problems as "problems," solutions can emerge. Our society needs more voices of workers. Mickey 17 will premiere worldwide for the first time in South Korea on the 28th and will be released in North America on March 7.