Hanjin management must prove layoff’s inevitability
The end of the 190-day strike at Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction Monday meant the labor union’s virtual defeat in another symbolic battle.
On the surface, the four-point agreement, which calls for, among others, greater benefits for those who accept voluntary resignation and minimal penalties for strikers, appears to be the result of mutual concession. But the union failed to push through one demand that caused it to walk out in the first place: cancellation of what it says are unjustifiable layoffs.
The nation’s legal system of course allows employers to fire workers if it is deemed inevitable because of financial and other managerial difficulties. Hanjin Heavy’s management cites in this regard the lack of new orders as the reason for dismissing 400 workers last December. But the same law calls on management to make supreme efforts to avoid layoffs and have close consultations with the union in the process. It is doubtful Hanjin Heavy made such endeavors six months ago.
Moreover, according to the company’s internal agreement to stabilize employment, the management cannot fire workers as long as its overseas plants are in operation. Hanjin Heavy’s shipyard in Subic Bay, the Philippines, has continued to build ships and reportedly received additional orders recently. The shipbuilder has also made profits of 430 billion won over the past decade.
Not long after the company notified workers of the massive layoffs, a small number of its large shareholders saw dividend of 17 billion won, more than three times the combined annual salaries of the 170 workers who have refused to accept the layoffs until now. The National Assembly’s labor affairs committee recently told the company’s chairman, Cho Nam-ho, to present himself and explain the labor dispute. Cho has since stayed abroad for reasons unknown.
Whether they wanted it or not, Hanjin Heavy unionists’ struggle has attracted international attention owing in part to the 170-day sit-in at a 45-meter-high tower crane by Kim Jin-suk, a 51-year-old labor leader who was a former Hanjin Heavy employee, and the support from not only the labor circles but other areas of the Korean society. Hundreds of supporters headed for the company aboard the ``Bus of Hope” to show solidarity. The French daily Le Monde said, “In Korea, social dialogue is ignored under the chaebol system or turned into violent conflicts.”
Part of the reasons for the desperate struggle is the nation’s extremely loose social safety net, in which dismissal is near synonymous to economic murder. Three workers have killed themselves at Hanjin Heavy. This even pales before the case of Ssangyong Motor, in which unionists also fought against layoffs but surrendered in 2009. Fifteen former Ssangyong workers and their family members have committed suicide or died of stress-related diseases.
Chairman Cho must attend parliament and verify why the layoffs were unavoidable and whether the company has made sufficient efforts to prevent them. Legislators for their part need to make bipartisan efforts to reexamine the law especially in ways to minimize unilateral dismissals, by, for instance, mandating the maintenance of overall payrolls through cutting work hours and wages.
It is important to make Korea a good country to do business in. No less or more significant than that is to first make it a livable country ― for the weakest links of society as well.
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