Credit: Ki Ho Park/Kistone
Yang Hae Woo
Director, Korea Migrant Workers' Human Rights Center, South Korea
Yang Hae Woo has been getting in the face of South Korean government officials her entire adult life. She started out as a student radical in the 1980s, protesting the abuses of military dictator Chun Doo Hwan. It wasn't long before she had focused her considerable energy on the issue of workers' rights, inspired in part by a summer she spent laboring in a toy factory. Yang finally found her true calling in the mid- 1990s, when she was arrested and spent a month in jail for blocking police from arresting illegal immigrant workers.
Read More from Winning Foreign Workers a New Deal
Read a Q&A with Yang Hae Woo