dagwolf:

It was out of that tumult, and a series of famous industrial strikes, that the KCTU was born. It is now the country’s second-largest union group and by far the most militant.

For the past six months, it has been organizing resistance to a raft of labor reforms pushed by President Park that will make it easier for the country’s family-run conglomerates (called chaebol) to fire workers and provide “flexibility” to Korean and foreign corporations. The law’s primary aim is to increase the huge number of part-time “irregular” workers in Korean industry (20 percent of the workforce, one of the highest rates in the industrialized world) and allow public and private employers to make unilateral changes in working conditions without consulting unions.

The reform “essentially implements a wish list of measures long advocated by corporate leaders, who hope to see their profits soar as a result,” Korea watcher Gregory Elich reports in a detailed article in Counterpunch. To increase pressure on the government, the KCTU says it will launch a general strike of its 680,000 members if the National Assembly moves to pass the reforms. That could happen shortly before Christmas.

“We have staked everything in this fight,” KCTU president Han Sang-gyun said in an interview with New York journalist Hyun Lee. “We’re talking about workers stopping production, freight trucks stopping in their tracks, railroad and subway workers on illegal strikes, and paralyzing the country so that the government will feel the outrage of the workers.” He says the labor reforms will “turn the entire country into a pool of irregular/precarious workers who can be dismissed at any time without cause.”

Over the weekend, the KCTU accused the government of “regressing to the dictatorial era” and called Park’s denial of its constitutional right to assembly “tantamount to the self-acknowledgement that the current government is a dictatorship.”

In recent weeks, police have conducted raids on union offices throughout South Korea. In one action, police invaded the national offices of the Korean Federation of Public Services and Transport Workers Union, seizing documents and computer hard-drives from the cargo workers. Many of its actions have been directed at public employee unions. Last spring, the government stripped the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union, with 60,000 members, of its representational rights.

Park’s crackdown has angered labor activists around the world, who claim that South Korea’s actions violate commitments it has made to respect worker rights in international trade and financial agreements signed over the past two decades. “South Korea is well on the way to becoming a pariah state in terms of trade union rights,” Owen Tudor, a top official with the British Trade Union Congress said last week.

In 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation ranked South Korea as among the world’s worst countries for worker rights. It was listed alongside China, Cambodia, Nigeria, and Bangladesh as a place where workers “are systematically exposed to unfair dismissals, intimidation, arrests and violence often leading to serious injuries and death,” The Wall Street Journal reportedreported. LabourStart, an international solidarity group, has launched an online petition calling on South Korea to “Stop attacks on trade unions now.”

Article opens with a quick history illustrating how comparisons of Park to her father are worthy and then does a pretty good job outlining the popular labor struggle with government here. Park’s administration is absolutely comparing labor activists with violent terrorists. And her reforms for labor are completely on behalf of chaebol and foreign corporate interests. 

We must fully support Korean workers in their struggle against government reforms.