Street Vendors Oppose Seouls Facelift Plan
By Kim Tae-jong
Staff Reporter
The Seoul Metropolitan Government seeks to standardize and regulate street stalls as part of efforts to give the city a facelift. As expected, the announcement is inviting strong opposition from street vendors who claim the scheme will threaten their source of survival.
``Every time the government comes up with such plans, we have to work under more pressure,'' a street vendor in downtown Seoul said. ``They only seem to threaten our survival.''
Such concerns and opposition by individual street vendors are seeing the expression of collective action.
The Korean Street Vendors' Confederation (KSVC), to which about 30 percent of all the street vendors belong, denounced the plan on grounds it does not consider the reality of street vendors.
``It looks as if the plan helps street vendors by legalizing their businesses and improving the city's appearance,'' Yu Eui-sun, general secretary of the largest street vendor group, said. ``But the reality is totally different. The plan is nothing but stricter regulations on us, which are made without considering our right to survive.''
When the city government came up with such a radical plan of reform, they should have discussed it with us, she said.
The overview of the plan is that the city government will legalize a street stall as a business, requiring vendors to follow the necessary steps such as registration and tax payment.
The Seoul mayor said he believed that the changes will stop them from prospering recklessly and defiling the appearance of the streets in the city.
``By 2009, we will complete the standardization of street stalls and come up with necessary regulations,'' Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon Monday told reporters during a news conference. ``Street vendors make a hard living by running street stalls but we will stop those who defile the streets and regulate conglomerate-like street stalls that generate huge profits.''
Some of the new regulations include the designation of special zones for street stalls, which will forbid the random setting up of stalls, and set opening hours, mostly from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Under the new move, street vendors also have to pay a fee of around 30.000 to 50,000 won for the use of the street.
The street vendors' group and the city government also showed a difference in their estimation of the number of street vendors.
The KSVC claimed that the total number of street vendors is around between 40,000 and 50,000 while the government estimated it at 12,351 as of last December.
``We agree that street stalls should change in terms of street appearance and hygiene. But a lot of street vendors will become jobless under the new regulations, which we have to stop,'' Yu said.