ED End of shipyard strike

Settlement should lead to resolving structural problems

The subcontractor workers of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) ended their 51-day strike at a shipyard on a southeastern island, Friday. Managers and unionists agreed on a 4.5 percent wage hike, payment of allowances and employment succession of workers at closed subcontractors. It's a relief that the highly volatile industrial action was settled without mishaps.

However, structural problems remain unsolved, leaving a spark for recurrent conflicts. In building a ship, subcontractors do almost all the labor-intensive work, such as melding and cutting, while primary contractors handle design and management. Under a multilevel subcontracting structure, workers at subcontracting firms are forced to do hard and dangerous labor at low wages. The just-ended walkout demonstrated the underlying weakness of Korea's shipbuilding industry, which unduly depends on low wages for subcontractor workers.

As a result, the domestic shipyards are enjoying the biggest order boom in seven years but suffer a labor shortage. The unionists' struggle aimed to show the plight of subcontractor workers, in which the wages of workers with 20 years of experience barely exceed the legal minimum wage. They called for severing the vicious circle of mass layoffs and wage cuts whenever the industry falls into a slump.

Considering that DSME's largest shareholder is the state-run Korea Development Bank (KDB), the government's response to the latest situation was regrettable for various reasons. The Yoon Suk-yeol administration sat back and did nothing in the strike's early phase, aggravating the situation. Instead of creating an atmosphere for dialogue, President Yoon hinted at sending in the riot police, saying, “We've waited long enough.”

It is also worrying that related ministers have threatened to punish some union leaders, holding them responsible. Their return to strong-arm tactics even before the ink dries on the labor-management agreement will rekindle the dispute. The government must act as the conflict coordinator and industrial policy enforcer by rectifying such chronic problems. If policymakers simply keep parroting the words “law and order,” they will never be able to normalize the nation's shipbuilding industry.