Dialogue, not repression, leads to success
The Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), the more moderate of Korea's two largest umbrella unions, will decide today whether to leave a trilateral council established to promote dialogue between labor, management and the government.
If the FKTU decides to exit the Economic, Social and Labor Council (ESLC), the committee will lose its effectiveness as a communication channel. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the more militant union, left the council in 1999.
One can't help but ask: With whom will this administration discuss its labor reform plan?
The government should blame no one else but itself for the situation.
Last Thursday, the council was scheduled to hold a meeting but canceled it because of the FKTU's absence. A day earlier, police officers brutally ended a unionized metal worker's sit-in protest on top of a 7-meter-high steel structure, bludgeoning him in the head. The police claimed the worker wielded a machete, but video footage showed he just held it.
Whoever used violence first, it was an excessive and unnecessary exercise of the police force. What prompted it? A few weeks before, President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered the police to deal with all violators of social order by applying strict legal standards. Yoon's police chief encouraged sweeping crackdowns on union rallies, even promising a special class promotion. Red pepper spray and water cannons will reappear in the streets soon.
The president's labor reform is going in the wrong direction.
"Even if it means losing votes, we will boldly reform education, labor and pensions," Yoon's policymaking chief said recently.
Yoon's conservative rival, Yoo Seong-min, immediately hit back, saying, "Don't lie." He then pointed out that suppressing unions with force under the guise of the rule of law cannot be called labor reform. "Making labor rules more flexible and rectifying polarized job market should be achieved through a grand compromise between labor, management and government," Yoo said.
We agree.
It is hard to know whether Yoon's goal is to reform or repress unions. His government started it by forcing unions to submit their accounting books, an "unwarranted" demand. Yoon called unionized construction workers "thugs" because they made employers prioritize union members and pay salaries for full-time union officials. These were time-honored, "almost legalized" practices at building sites. A union official burned himself to death recently. "It hurts my self-esteem that they regard me as a criminal. I just conducted union activities," he said in his will.
The president points to the vast wage gap between full-time and part-time workers and between employees at large companies and small firms. But Korea is a free capitalist country where workers are treated differently according to their abilities. If Yoon thought the gap was too broad, he was right. However, the chief executive is wrong to try to correct it by squeezing relatively well-to-do workers in favor of less privileged ones.
Yoon should rectify the numerous layers of subcontracting and re-subcontracting structures in shipyards, steel plants and other large manufacturing sites. On top of the labor exploitation pyramid are family-run conglomerates, called chaebol, for whom Yoon cut taxes, calling them this country's industrial frontrunners.
A ruling party lawmaker proposed a bill recently aiming at the "same wage for the same work," probably reading his boss' mind. That's also what workers have long called for. But workers don't want this to be a zero-sum game where one worker gets benefits at the expense of another. They want employers, mainly big businesses, to share more.
However, it is doubtful whether Yoon is willing to do this. He sometimes seems to think industrialists are patriots and unionists are obstructers. For him, the only good workers may be nonunionized ones, accounting for 86 percent of Korean laborers. But the president must know they could not form or join unions.
Yoon's labor-bashing policy earned him some points from conservative supporters. Its eventual result will come in the general elections next April.
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