South Korea: rail workers, repression and resistance

Source: Open Demoracy

An almost unreported strike in South Korea, which has just come to an end, epitomises how a ‘free’ market can be incompatible with the liberty of workers to defend their own security.

Eric Lee

The mainstream media struggle to understand Korea. Throughout December, global news coverage focussed on the latest purge in North Korea, a former basketball star’s visit to the Communist state, and rising tensions between both Koreas and Japan, following the visit of the Japanese prime minister to a controversial war memorial. But CNN, the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera and others had absolutely nothing to say about a strike in South Korea that has shaken the society profoundly—culminating in mass actions involving hundreds of thousands of people on the last weekend of 2013.

The railway workers’ strike, which began early in the month, took place in a society where workers’ rights are routinely violated. Of course South Korea is infinitely freer and richer than North Korea and a far better place to live: in North Korea, workers have no rights at all and many thousands live as slaves in the country’s extensive Gulag of labour camps. South Korea, on the other hand, has free elections, a free press, freedom of religion, the right to demonstrate. And one would expect it to allow workers to join and create free and independent trade unions, as is the case in most democracies.

Like every other country in the world, South Korea is obliged under international law to respect the eight ‘core conventions’ of the International Labour Organisation. These guarantee the right of all workers to join and form trade unions, to bargain collectively with their employers and so on. But the South Korea government is regularly accused of violating these rights.

Things have improved in recent years: the left-wing Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) was finally legalised in 1999. The Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU)—an older, more conservative, trade-union federation—had been legal for some time. But industrial relations in South Korea continue to be characterised by trade-union militancy on the one side and anti-union repression on the other. Imprisonment of trade-union leaders is common.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/eric-lee/south-korea-rail-workers-repression-and-resistance

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Standing up for the right to organise--two of the tens of thousands of workers who joined the KCTU protest on December 28 in Seoul. Flickr / Mac Urata. All rights reserved.