Korean struggle

By STIG JUTTERSTRÖM Ryu Jae han was 20 when he started working at the melting furnace at Sammi Speciality Steel Industry at Chang-won, one of the largest cities in South Korea, close to the country's south coast. The date was March 2, 1984, an important day in his young life. At the beginning, the heat from the enormous furnace frightened him, but he looked at the future with a great deal of confidence. Having finished his mandatory 26 months' military service, his mind was entirely set at working hard. Ryu wanted to be financially independent, start a family and also be able to make a small contribution to his parents. Families are close-knit in South Korea. Today, aged 36, he has been unemployed for three and a half years. Ryu belongs to the 150 Sammi workers who have been struggling every day since December 1996 to get their jobs back. The struggle started when the Pohang Steel Corporation (Posco), the world's largest steel mill, took over Sammi Speciality Steel Industry. The corporation sacked 580 of the original 2,342 workers, claiming that they had no legal obligation to guarantee jobs for all the Sammi employees. However, Ryu, and the 185 other union activists the company managed to get rid of, thought there was such an obligation, and they won the support of four courts of law. But that was to no avail. Posco, which is known for its anti-union stance, has refused to reinstate the sacked workers, and the case is now to be determined by the highest court of law in South Korea. THEIR SAVINGS ARE USED UP Ryu had really managed to become financially independent. He had saved 30 million Korean won (US$28,000) to buy a new car, and other things. He had bought a house in nearby Masan and started a family. His sons, Young-sun and Jung-hyun, were already six and three years old. But their savings are all used up now. His wife, Kim Sook-sun, delivers milk in the morning between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m., earning 30,000 won (US$28) a month. Ryu was earning 1.7 million won (US$1,590) a month at Sammi. Wages have fallen since then, with Korean metalworkers now earning between 600,000 and 1 million won (US$570-950) per month. Ryu wears a red vest, a blue jacket and a red ribbon over his forehead with the words "Reinstate Sammi workers". He is furious about and even feels hatred for the way in which the company acted and is absolutely determined in his fight to get his job back. So is Cho Yong-chea, 54 years old, who has lived in Chang-won for 25 years. He was handpicked by the company, which hired him in 1979, promising to pay him twice the wages of the other workers. It took only a month for him to realise that the employer was not going to keep this promise. And as there was no trade union to help him, all he could do was to accept the wage decrease. Today he has no wage at all. His three children are grown up and look after themselves. His wife works in a car safety-belt plant in order to feed the family. He became a trade union activist in 1996 and now describes himself as a "professional fighter." He is convinced that one day he will be reinstated. The first trade union was started at his company in 1987, the year when South Korea was exploding with student and worker protests against the military dictatorship. Thousands were arrested, including the current South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, at that time one of the political opposition leaders, who was condemned to death and subsequently reprieved. STRONG INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT 1987 also saw the beginnings of the organisation which was to become the Korean Metal Workers' Federation (KMWF), which supports the "Help Reinstate Sammi Speciality Steel Workers" campaign. So does the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), to which the KMWF belongs. Sammi workers have attracted a great deal of attention all over the country and provided a kind of lesson for Korean trade union struggles. Everybody now knows the Sammi workers, who have also attracted strong international support through a postcard campaign and many protest letters to the steel company and to the government. There were trade unions in South Korea before 1987. There was and still is the metalworkers' union called the Federation of Korean Metalworkers' Trade Unions (FKMTU), which belongs to the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU). It was started soon after World War II and has always been recognised by the government. Since the law only permits one trade union in each sector, the KMWF and KCTU newcomers were considered illegal for a long time. The KCTU was formed in November 1995, but it was only recognised by the government in December of last year. During the period it was illegal, more than 3,000 trade union activists went in and out of jail. It is the newer of the two metalworkers' unions, the KMWF, which is the larger, with 170,000 members, primarily from the automotive, shipbuilding and steel industries. The FKMTU has 120,000 members and is stronger in the electrical and electronics industries. Both unions have lost members since the 1997, due to the economic crisis and as a result of the government's policies since then. WHY TWO METALWORKERS' UNIONS? Why, then, are there two rival metalworkers' unions, and what are the differences between them? "There are no ideological differences, and the aims are quite similar," says Yu Jae-soub, the president of the older metalworkers' union, the FKMTU. He became president in 1996, after heading the trade union at Lucky Goldstar for nine years. "The difference between us is the way in which we act to reach our goals," he says. "They want things to go faster, and we take a calmer view. Since historically we have been a legal organisation, we don't get arrested either." The president of the KMWF since 1999, Mun Sung-hyun has often been in jail. He laughed when I asked him if he intends to attend the IMF's Central Committee meeting in Birmingham this year: "Sure, if I am not in jail. So far I was in detention every time in the last five years." In contrast with the KMWF, the FKMTU takes part in tripartite cooperation with the employers and the government. Although both unions had left the tripartite talks because they were not getting a response to their demands, the FKMTU returned some months ago. The younger of the two federations supported the small, newly-formed Democratic Labour Party (DLP) in this year's elections in April. They strongly criticise the current president, Kim Dae-jung, and his party, the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP), which the KMWF's leadership described as conservative and anti-worker. "Before he became president he promised to do a number of things which would benefit the poorest and the middle-ranking segments in society. But things have only got worse for them. Kim Dae-jung is in the hands of the employers," says Jeon Jae-hwan, the KMWF general secretary since February 1999. DIFFERENT MEMBERSHIP SUBSCRIPTIONS The established union, the FKMTU, did not officially support the labour party, although individual members of the leadership did. The president of the older FKTU national trade union centre, Park In-sang, who had previously been president of the metalworkers' union, resigned six weeks before the elections to run as a member of parliament in Kim Dae-jung's party. Membership subscriptions also differ. The members of the newer metalworkers' union have to pay 1,500 won (US$1.40) a month, of which 500 won is paid to the national confederation. In the FKMTU, however, members pay 900 won (US$0.85) monthly, of which 300 won goes to the confederation. The reason for this huge difference is that the established union is given financial support by the government, which the younger union refuses to accept because of its principles. The KMWF decided at its Congress in February this year that it would change and become a national industrial workers' union, from having previously been company-based. On the fourth floor of the office building where the union is situated, 22 members of union branches from all over the country have for several months been engaged in trade union studies; they are even reading the Swedish Metalworkers' Union constitution. They will be going to Sweden in two batches during the summer to learn more about the principle of industrial unions. The older metalworkers' union made a similar decision at its National Convention in May and hopes to learn from the experiences of IG Metall in Germany. REFUGE IN THE MYONG-DONG CATHEDRAL Sammi workers are not the only struggling workers in South Korea. When this reporter visited the country in early April, the carworkers at Daewoo Motor Company took industrial action one day to protest against the plan to sell the country's second largest car manufacturer to a foreign company, possibly General Motors or Ford. Sixty-seven workers were detained that day by the police when they took to the streets to protest against any overseas sale. The following day around 80,000 workers (Daewoo - 10,385 workers; Ssangyong autoworkers - 4,335; Hyundai autoworkers - 37,578; KIA autoworkers -- 20,094) downed their tools in protest against this possible sale. Hundreds of buses filled with police shock troops had been mobilised, but no one was detained. The demonstration took place only a few blocks from the Catholic Myong-dong cathedral, where many of the wanted workers' leaders have taken refuge in the past to avoid being arrested. Cardinal Stephano Kim Su-hwan has publicly supported both the Sammi workers and others in their struggles, and the police have never dared enter the cathedral to take the wanted persons into custody. The South Korean trade union movement has been engaged in a defensive struggle over the last years. The militants feel very bitter about Kim Dae-jung, who has practised totally different policies from what he promised before the presidential elections in 1997. The protests against his policies have led to an even larger number of trade union leaders being detained in his three years in power than during the whole of the previous presidency. A HARD-WORKING PEOPLE It is the industrial workers who have been at the forefront of the South Korean economic miracle. The country is virtually devoid of natural resources. Their greatest resource is the hard-working, inventive people of Korea, who work 44 hours a week plus overtime and are prepared to put up with just one week's holiday a year. Before the Asian crisis in 1997, the export industry was flourishing, and growth amounted to 6-8 percent per year. In the 1960s, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in South Korea was at the same level as that of Algeria. In 1997, their economy was the eleventh largest in the world, with a per capita income comparable to that of Portugal. During this time, average life expectancy had risen from 55 to 71 years. The 1997 financial crisis, which is generally known as "the IMF crisis" (referring to the International Monetary Fund) in South Korea, made the country slip down in the list of wealthy nations. Slowly but surely it is on its way up again. The International Monetary Fund pumped large loans into the country on condition that the government carried out a number of reforms which enable transnational companies to enter the Korean market more easily than ever. The employers have been given increased rights to hire and fire people than before. The South Korean tradition of jobs for life in large industrial enterprises is no longer a matter of course. In 1998, 10,000 workers were losing their jobs every day. The crisis hit marginalised people even more, since there is no unemployment benefit or other social safety nets. COUNTRY BEING RUN ON WORKERS' SACRIFICES Kim Dae-jung had also promised to reform the family-controlled conglomerates, known as chaebols. The five largest are world brand leaders, such as Hyundai, Samsung, Daewoo, Lucky Goldstar and Sunkyong. They stand for a third of all sales in South Korea and half the country's exports. Out of 64 chaebols, a dozen went bankrupt during the crisis, but the largest retained their power. "There have been a few changes on paper, but not in reality," says Jeon Jae-hwan, the KMWF general secretary. "The Korean government and the big chaebols have always had a shared common interest in running this country, and it is based on workers' sacrifices". Official unemployment figures have fallen rapidly and are now down to approximately 6 per cent, or 1,350,000 people. But this is only part of the truth. Many persons have given up on finding a permanent job and are no longer registered in the official statistics. The real truth is probably closer to 3 to 4 million unemployed.