Videos of South Korean Labor/ Student Protests

At the National Conference on Organized Resistance this spring there were quite a few workshops on independent media and the representation of activism. One speaker coined a hilarious term -- "riot porn" -- to describe journalism/ video/ photography that glorifies active resistance while doing little to discuss the context, people, and stakes from which it formed. Since getting here I've become interested in finding information on the South Korean labor and student movement and wouldn't you know there is quite a few videos of protests available on right on Youtube. This stuff is riot porn to the core, and I was hesitant to post it on this blog for that reason, but I do find it interesting that these encounters happen as frequently as they do here and that the protesters get away with as much as they do without being obliterated by the police. If nothing else, they're valuable just to see how serious these protests are taken here.




Illegal labor protest in Pohan that took place, I think, sometime in 2006.



Korean National Labor Union Protest in Seoul, South Korea sometime last year I think. 1st - 5th and 2nd Mobile on the scene, with the 4th, 51st Mobile Company at the end.

South Korean Labor Movement

When I would tell people in the states that I was moving to South Korea, if they didn't immediately bring up the situation in the north they brought up the South Korean labor movement. One of my rides during my hitchhiking trip through California and Oregon this May-- a guy who had been heavily involved in anti-globalization protests on the west coast-- said that during a world bank protest he had attended in Mexico, South Korean auto workers were at the head of the march, smashing cars and confronting antagonistic police to make room for people to get through the streets. Since arriving I've tried to keep on top of the news through the Korean Herald (one of many English language newspapers here) and everyday its had at least 2-3 articles on unions and the labor movement. At least three major companies have had small strikes in the last few weeks and so far this doesn't seem too unusual for the country. Below is a good summary of the history and direction of the Korean labor movement that was featured in the Herald earlier this week.

[Insight into Korea(5)] Labor movement in Korea losing steam

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the June 10 civil uprising of 1987 and the 10th year since the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. We have prepared a series of contributions from prominent foreign scholars to analyze the significant changes that Korea has undergone during the past two decades. We hope our readers can gain some insights into the nation's future from these articles. - Ed.

South Korea is well known for possessing one of the most aggressive and militant labor movements in the world today. At a time when organized labor in most advanced industrial countries is severely weakened and remains in the doldrums, South Korean labor seems rather unique in demonstrating fresh militancy and class solidarity backed by powerful unions located in heavy and chemical industries. Foreign media often portray South Korea as a country with "endemic strikes," and foreign investors are said to be afraid of the powerful unions when they consider investing in South Korea. On the other side, international labor groups show great respect for the Korean labor movement in playing a leading role in fighting neoliberal globalization.

Looking inside Korea, however, we see a different picture. Korea's large unions indeed demonstrate militancy often enough, but they hardly make up a strong and cohesive union movement. The Korean union movement currently represents no more than 11 percent of the active labor force, and union membership is disproportionately made up of the employees of large firms, leaving the majority of the workforce at small enterprises unprotected. Also excluded is the rapidly growing number of irregular workers, who now comprise more than half of the national work force. Although there is a strong push for building industry unions, the basic structure of Korean unions is that of enterprise unions, which make it difficult to achieve broad solidarity among workers in diverse job conditions. Labor leadership at the national level appears hopelessly divided along ideological and factional lines, failing to offer an effective strategy to deal with serious structural problems faced by the working class in this age of globalism. There seems to be wide public disaffection with the militant strategy adopted by large unions in their wage negotiations. Labor groups seem increasingly isolated from other social movements, which are now led by the active citizens' movement. With declining public support, and with growing internal division, the current South Korean labor movement faces a serious crisis of identity and class solidarity.

Thus, in order to understand the nature of the Korean labor movement adequately, we must address the dual aspects of Korean labor - its militancy and its organizational weakness. And to do so, we need a little historical knowledge of the way the Korean labor movement developed in the process of rapid industrialization over the past four decades.

Brief history

It is rather conventional among many observers to see the origin of the current labor movement in South Korea in the huge wave of labor conflicts that erupted in the summer of 1987, in the wake of the political transition to democracy. Almost immediately after Chun Doo-hwan conceded to the demands of the opposition forces for a direct presidential election in June 29, 1987, Korea's industrial laborers broke a long period of imposed silence and passivity and plunged into collective actions. From July to September 1987, more than three thousand labor conflicts occurred, exceeding the total number of labor disputes that occurred during the two preceding decades. The great labor struggle in 1987 clearly marks a landmark in the development of the Korean labor movement.

It is important to realize, however, that the 1987 labor upheaval was not the beginning of the democratic union movement in South Korea. It started much earlier, though not well recognized by foreign observers. In many ways, the contemporary Korean labor movement started with the famous suicide by a young tailor, Chon Tae-il in 1970. He set himself on fire to protest inhumane working conditions in a sweatshop district called Peace Market in Seoul. Until his body was completely burned by the flames, Chon held a copy of the Labor Standard Laws in his hand and shouted: "We are not machines!" "Let us rest on Sunday!" "Abide by the Labor Standard Laws!" "Don't exploit workers!"

Chun's self-immolation had a tremendous impact on the working class movement in South Korea. It sowed the spirit of resistance and rebellion in the minds of millions of workers and provided a powerful symbol for the working class in a society that until then did not have a sacred symbol that could inspire and mobilize workers for a collective goal. What he fought for was justice and human dignity rather than simple economic improvement. Chun's protest therefore carried an enormous moral authority. More concretely, his tragic death played an instrumental role in bringing students and intellectuals to assist the grassroots labor movement during the harsh authoritarian period.

The grassroots union movement began following Chun's heroic self-sacrifice, and it was led by young female workers employed in labor-intensive light manufacturing sectors. The late-1970s to the early-1980s was a period marked by incredible episodes of labor resistance waged by women workers in the textile, garment and electronic industries. In one instance, women protesters stood naked in front of combat troops in order to prevent the cops from approaching them; in another instance, strikers threatened to commit collective suicide with broken bottles if the cops were going to attack them; and in still another instance, striking women workers stormed into the opposition party headquarters to secure a safer place to continue their strike. Women workers' struggle during this period demonstrated an amazing spirit of resistance and comradeship. An important feature of the union movement in the 1970s was the involvement of church groups and intellectuals in labor struggles. In the 1970s, two progressive church groups, the Urban Industrial Mission (UIM) and the Young Catholic Workers (JOC), provided a variety of educational programs to workers and defended the workers from state prosecution. In the 1980s, labor struggles became more politicized as a stream of student activists entered the industrial arena. The Gwangju massacre in 1980 contributed greatly to radicalizing the students. Students came to realize that they alone could not bring down the military dictatorship and that they must ally with the working class. The nohak yeondae, labor-student alliance, became their dominant strategy, and under this strategy a large number of students dropped out of college and became factory workers in order to raise political consciousness among factory workers.

By the mid-1980s, a large number of subterranean networks of labor activists had been formed both inside and outside the factories. Gradually, these subterranean networks extended beyond the Seoul-Inchon region and to the southern coastal industrial towns where heavy and chemical industries were concentrated. Male workers employed in these areas had been quiet on the surface until the mid-1980s, but they were not unaffected by this radical trend. Behind close company surveillance, many skilled workers in southern industrial towns, like Ulsan, Masan, and Changwon, were reading Marxist literature and forming small discussion groups.

Industrial workers all over the nation did not hesitate when the opportunity opened up in June 1987 to take collective action to demand humane treatment and economic justice in their workplaces. The significance of the 1987 labor uprising was that it brought new actors into the South Korean labor movement. The center of labor conflicts shifted from small-scale, light manufacturing sectors to heavy chemical industrial centers. The semi-skilled male workers in heavy and chemical industries emerged suddenly as the main actors of the South Korean labor movement, pushing aside women workers, who had played an active role in the grassroots union movement in the previous period. The union movement since then has become dominated by male workers employed in large-scale firms and women workers have become marginalized in the labor movement. The new unionism thus emerged represented a militant unionism with a strong antipathy and mistrust toward management and the government. This was undoubtedly the product of the extremely repressive labor regime during the authoritarian period of rapid industrialization.

The post-1987 development

The democratic transition in Korea since 1987 greatly modified the terrain of the Korean labor movement. Organized labor suddenly became empowered and emerged as a major social force for democratic reform and social justice. Many new and powerful unions were formed at large manufacturing firms, and many white-collar unions were also formed in the service sector. Union members increased from 1,004,000 in 1985 to 1,932,000 in 1989, or from 12.4 percent of the labor force to 19.8 percent. During the heyday of labor activism from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, production workers at conglomerate firms obtained hefty wage hikes with increased welfare compensation. Unions themselves also became democratized. The previously government-controlled Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) was reformed to become a genuinely independent and representative union. But a more significant development was the formation of an alternative radical national center, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 1995, comprising many powerful unions in the automobile, shipbuilding, health care and telecommunications industries, as well as in education and various service sectors. If democratization is one major force that influenced the post-1987 Korean union movement, another powerful force impinging on Korean labor was globalization of the South Korean economy, which has accelerated its pace since the early 1990s. If democratization opened the political space for the labor movement, globalization functioned to undermine the economic base of the unionism. Globalization in Korea brought new managerial practices aimed at creating a flexible labor force. The major focus of labor-management conflicts in the first half of the 1990s was on labor laws concerned with employer rights on utilization of labor and particularly on layoffs of workers. The conflict resulted in the Kim Young-sam government's ill-calculated legislative move to pass controversial labor laws, which were to give more power to employers to lay off workers, at a pre-dawn National Assembly session on December 26, 1996, with no opposition lawmaker present. This undemocratic move triggered a huge labor response. The newly formed KCTU and the old FKTU coordinated successfully to produce the first large-scale general strike since the Korean War, mobilizing millions of workers over a three-week period in January 1997. Since the strike was about job security and at a time when more and more people were experiencing job instability, as well as about democratic procedures, the public was fully supportive of the strike. This was one of the rare moments since the 1987 transition when organized labor appeared as a moral force fighting for social justice, democracy and economic interests not only of union members but of all working people in society.

This euphoric moment, however, did not last long because the Korean economy was hit by a financial crisis a few months later. As everybody well knows, the financial crisis and the IMF-mandated economic restructuring brought on devastating consequences to Korean people, producing a staggering number of business failures, a sharp increase in unemployment, frozen wages, decreased income, curtailments of non-wage benefits, a growing number of homeless people, and many other social problems. In order to overcome the crisis, the newly-elected President Kim Dae-jung proposed to form a labor-management-government tripartite body along the social corporatist model. In February 1998, the Tripartite Commission succeeded in producing a Tripartite Accord that, among other things, allowed employers to implement redundancy layoffs in case of business failures. Although this Tripartite Accord was welcomed as a historical compromise by most interested parties, the rank-and-file members of the KCTU were upset by the result and forced the union leadership to resign. Subsequently, the KCTU stepped out of the Tripartite Commission, and the bad feelings created at this time continued to haunt the radical leadership and operate as a source of deep mistrust toward the government's effort for labor-capital compromise.

Current situation

Two decades have passed since the great labor uprising in 1987. The Korean union movement has developed impressively since that turning point and enjoys a renowned status in the international labor movement. But the current state of the Korean union movement is far from enviable; it is beset with serious organizational, structural and ideological problems. As mentioned above, the union members now represent less than 11 percent of the wage workers. Union membership peaked at 19.8 percent in 1989 and has been falling ever since. It dropped to 12.0 percent in 2000 and to 10.6 percent at the end of 2004. Not only is the unionization rate low, it is limited largely to workers employed at large firms. Currently, more than three quarters of union members are workers employed at large firms hiring 300 or more employees. Less than a quarter of union members are found in smaller enterprises. Of enterprises with fewer than 300 employees, only 2.8 percent have unions present, while 69 percent of enterprises with 300 or more workers have unions. This shallow and skewed union membership structure raises a serious question about the representativeness of the current union movement - the union movement for whom? Organized labor is no longer looked at as the socially weak but as the unduly powerful and aggressive. Despite some efforts at the national union level, local unions are increasingly preoccupied with narrow economic issues affecting their memberships. Union leaders seem to be divided along ideological, factional and regional lines. Frequent revelations of corruption and violence within union leadership have destroyed public support. No longer is the union movement able to claim the moral leadership it had in the 1980s. More fundamentally, the union movement has been unable to offer any alternative vision or practical policy alternatives in opposing neoliberal globalization.

We can identify several factors that underlie the present predicament of the Korean union movement, structural, institutional and ideological.

The first is the structural source of the problems. It concerns basically the impact of globalization on the structure of the labor force. Since South Korea adopted globalization as official policy in the early 1990s, much change has occurred in the South Korean economy. Most salient was its impact on the labor market structure. Despite strong resistance from labor, large-scale firms have carried out extensive industrial restructuring in order to reduce their labor costs and increase labor market flexibility. As a consequence, the number of regularly employed workers has noticeably declined while that of irregular workers has increased sharply since the mid-1990s. In 2004, the proportion of irregular workers (including temporary workers, subcontract workers, casual hires and dispatched workers) reached 56 percent of the labor force. (The government's more conservative estimate puts the figure at 38 percent.) Obviously, these irregular workers are situated in a far inferior job market situation compared with regular workers. On average, the irregular workers receive about half of regular workers' wages and are typically not covered by statutory welfare policies. And most irregular workers are denied union membership, even when they are working at the same firm.

The fragmentation of the labor force associated with neoliberal globalization is, of course, a well known phenomenon around the world. But in South Korea, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The South Korean labor force was relatively homogeneous until the early 1990s. But serious internal differentiation has occurred in the past decade, especially after the financial crisis in 1997. The differentiation occurred not only between regular and irregular workers, but also between those employed at large firms and those at smaller firms. The recent economic trend in South Korea produced an increasingly polarized business structure. Large firms, especially chaebol firms, adapted to global competition relatively well, while many small enterprises suffered serious problems. This polarized economic structure is reflected in the labor force, producing two classes of wage workers, sharply divided by the size of the firms they are employed at and the terms of their employment. Union membership is correlated with these two factors. So, typical union members are likely to be those who are employed regularly at large firms or in the public service sector.

The second source of problems faced by the South Korean union movement is an institutional one, basically the decentralized, enterprise-based union structure. The enterprise union system was the product of the labor regime during the authoritarian government period. The authoritarian regimes maintained the enterprise union system because it was considered an easier system to keep enterprise unions isolated from one another and to prevent outside political influence. Unfortunately, the new union movement since 1987 did not challenge this union structure, presumably because many newly formed unions at large firms found no conflict of interest with the enterprise union system. And, once the post-1987 labor regime was settled based on enterprise unionism, it became very difficult to change it.

So, we can see that many of the problems faced by the Korean labor movement derive from structural and institutional sources rather than simple problems of union leadership or selfish motives of the unionized workers. These are difficult problems to overcome. One notable exception that has been made in recent years was the effort to form industrial unions to overcome the limitations of enterprise unions. Of several industrial unions formed in recent years, the metal worker union is the most important one, with about 143,000 members and representing powerful local unions, such as the Hyundai, Kia and Ssangyong automotive unions. But it is still uncertain to what extent these industrial unions will be able to work as effective organs representing broader worker interests and devising viable policies in the face of accelerating globalization. As revealed by the most recent case of the anti-FTA strike organized by the Korean Metal Workers' Union (KMWU), the power of the industrial union, let alone the national flagship union, over powerful local member unions (in this case the Hyundai Motor's union) is very limited. It is possible that this anti-FTA strike was an ill-timed, ill-considered decision by the metal union leadership without due consultation with local union leaders, but Hyundai Motor workers' vehement opposition to participating in what they consider a political strike was telling evidence of how difficult it is to organize class solidarity on an industry basis. It is particularly so because Hyundai Motor's union is known to be the most radical union in the nation, conducting annual strikes for the past 13 years, and because the KMWU is the most powerful union at the industry level. Nonetheless, there seems to be enough consensus among Korean labor groups that building effective industrial unions is the only solution to addressing the mounting problems of unprotected workers and the increasing fragmentation of the Korean working class in this age of globalization.

By Hagen Koo

Introducing Chuncheon

After a long, long trip here via multiple planes, buses, days, and sleeps I've begun the first leg of my six week orientation for the F-bright grant that I'll be serving out over the next year here in South Korea. I've been shuttled off to a mid-sized college town named Chuncheon with 69 other ETAs from all across the states and boarded in Kwangwon National University, where we will be taking intensive language and teaching lessons until we leave for our homestays and teaching positions when the monsoon rains begin to calm in mid-August. I still don't feel like I've gotten a good feel for Chuncheon yet -- this evening is the first I've had free and I spent it recovering sleep, studying Korean, and starting this entry. I'm dying to explore the neighborhoods here and its been an odd transition since that's usually the first thing I run to when I travel into a new city. When there aren't class obligations to go to here there's always outside activities planned so that we can get to know our grant-mates -- the people who will be our support system over the next year when people back home don't understand when we occasionally freak out about what is going on in our classrooms and homes.

So far I know little about where I will be placed, but I have found out that by random fate I've been made one of 10 elementary teachers here and the only male elementary ETA ever for F-bright Korea. This does mean that, unlike the secondary education teachers, I'll have little choice in where I get placed and will probably be put in a rural area somewhere along the west coast.

To the right is a picture of my roommate, Alec, who I think is trying to kill us by leaving his fan on while we sleep with the doors and windows closed. It may not seem like a big deal, but Koreans believe that it can cause a little thing called FAN DEATH that is backed by scientific research from Korean universities!