South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
NCPD gathers strength
The NCPD "News Flash" also reported on its own press conference of 17th January at which it was announced that the number of local divisions set up since 26th December now totals 56. From many regions, even where there were no branches, data and news of activities were being constantly requested.
Park Seok-woon, one of the NCPD’s best known organisers, was speaking later that day at an opposition "symposium" in a plush auditorium at the parliament building. "The opposition parties," he said, addressing himself to some of their leaders in the hall, "Maintain that ‘the people are not ready for this fight’, but ‘the people’ are all already involved in it. The only ones who are not are the Chaebol (bosses)". He described the work of his organisation. "No less than 200 campaign teams go out every day distributing leaflets, collecting signatures, raising funds and selling protest postcards (at ten times their cost)".
Indeed, their temporary headquarters in Hyanglin Church Hall, down a narrow, back street in Myong Dong, is like a revolutionary nerve centre - again "high-tech". A whole bank of computers is in use all the time. With these and with mobile phones, close contact is maintained with the areas and an impressive level of information and propaganda is produced. Leaflets, results of opinion polls, plans for raising awareness, bulletins are e-mailed and faxed backwards and forwards. Circles of young people ("warriors" as Park calls them) earnestly discuss the day’s activity and their responsibilities. Others prepare billboards or large collecting boxes and stack them up. Groups go out with their portable tables and come back hours later to warm up beside the stoves. Volunteers stay overnight, curled up in sleeping bags on a small stage. Others work on into the small hours, like those who translate and despatch the "Struggle Flash Strike News".
Grim testimony at Myong Dong
Nearly four weeks after the movement had erupted, public opinion was still preventing the state forces from going in to arrest the seven KCTU leaders at Myong Dong cathedral. But attacks on the unions at a local level continued. Hukkoku is a notoriously anti-union Japanese-owned firm. In the past six months two leaders there had been jailed, 40 workers sacked and "punished" in one way or another. Now strikers had been beaten up by the kusadae, a special breed of Korean mafia-type gangsters often hired by Chaebol owners to ‘soften up’ their work-force.
An agitated Hukkoku worker was visiting the KCTU camp looking for help:
"Newspapers who are Chaebol-owned don’t print anything about our plight," he said with exasperation. "Even the ‘progressive’ Hankyure is frightened of losing its advertising revenue. So we collected six million won ourselves and paid for a half-page appeal in the paper on the 15th January.
"On the twelfth day of the strike, we had been gathering at the factory gate to go to the central rally when the managers and 20 gangsters, Korean Mafia, employed by the company, launched a terror attack on the workmen. Result - three persons with broken ribs and one with a broken nose. Another 40 were injured, seven hospitalised.
"And now the company wants the trade union’s leader to pay 408 million won for damage in the clash. The trade union is saying to the police, the prosecutor, the city hall, the land administration to investigate and punish. But they did not have any action. We want something done about this employer, internationally if possible, especially through the unions in Japan".
Foreign journalists visiting Myong Dong were also given a rough hand-out about the self-immolation in Ulsan of 33 year-old union activist, Chung Jae-sung:
"On 10th January, after a rally at the Taewha riverside, Hyundai Motor Company trade unionists and their families marched towards the city’s centre. The police shot teargas and blocked the way. Mr Chung was at the front of the march. He shouted: ‘You steal the democracy; do not block the march!’ But the police continued...
‘This is paint thinner,’ he shouted. ‘If you do not retreat I will burn myself to death!’ But riot police continued to block (the way). Suddenly, Mr Chung threw the paint-thinner onto his body and (set) fire (to) himself. His body became burning. He shouted ‘Struggle!’.
"His comrades wanted the police to hand over the fire extinguisher but they did not. They shot more tear-gas. They didn’t call the fire emergency car. His friends called the fire station - 119 - with telephone borrowed from near shop. His body trembling, he shouts: ‘Down with the anti-workers law!’
"He is brought to (the local) hospital and then moved to Seoul. 25% of his skin was burnt with 2 and 3 degrees. At the hospital he shouts: ‘The bad bills must be defeated!’"
After the incident, Hyundai management shut down the factory. On 30th January there was a demonstration "In hope for Mr Chung’s quick recovery". Though he will always suffer from constant, debilitating pain, Chung Jae-sung’s life is no longer in danger. Nevertheless, to his chagrin, most of the hated labour laws which drove him to take such drastic action remain on the statute books.
"Not a 100 metre race"
The struggle of the Korean movement is indeed a "marathon". The ‘runners’ make this clear in their own words in interview after interview. There are those introduced by the energetic Kim Young-kon of the National Association of Labour Movement Organisations (NALMO) in his tent, a little down the hill from those of the KCTU leadership. There are the participants of the numerous mass demos and the organisers of the unions and the support campaigns.
And there are the students - often first into the struggle and a barometer of discontent and unrest. So far, this time round, they have been noticeably absent, most of them still on their long winter holiday. They have been participating in the movement here and there as individuals, with just the occasional small demonstration of the students still on campus organised by one or another group. But a feature in one of the left papers gives a clue as to what has happened to the legendary South Korean student movement. Chung Young-ki, the president of the largest student organisation - Hanchongryon (the Korean Federation of University Student Councils) - was in hiding from the police. His organisation had over a million members but had suffered enormously at the hands of the state since last August when it organised an ‘illegal’ Festival in the grounds of Yonsei University to commemorate Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule and discuss the sensitive issue of re-unification.
Then, under orders from Kim Young-sam, the riot police had laid siege to the university for nine days - a massive force of 21,000 plus 5,000 special officers. They bombarded the students with tear-gas from helicopters, stopped all supplies of food, medicine, water and electricity. They picked up people who just happened to be in the area near the university, beat them up and sexually assaulted young women. When, eventually, the police moved in on the students they went for anyone and everyone. Nearly 6,000 were corralled and taken to the police cells where they were interrogated and many of them badly tortured. As of January 1997, 357 students were still in jail, some with long sentences to serve out.
The authorities have refused to renovate the five-storey general building where the students had been holed up until the final battle. They are leaving it with all its smashed windows and charred doorways fenced off as a reminder and a warning to all students not to get caught up in left-wing politics. Three women undergraduates who had watched the whole police operation in horror from their hostel windows explained how these tactics, and the mood of shock that pervaded the university afterwards, had temporarily succeeded.
"The students at Yonsei have been frightened into electing a moderate, apolitical leader as president. But let’s hope it’s only a temporary setback. How can we rest easy while our friends are still being held? And also, our own prospects of getting a job are narrowing by the day, even when we graduate with good results. Naturally we identify with the present struggles of workers against flexibility and increasing unemployment. We want them to win this one".
Organising and striking
At the Myong Dong camp, NALMO’s Kim Young-kon was optimistic about the struggle. He explained which workers come under which trade union federations.
"Construction and hospital workers, car workers and clerical workers are with the KCTU. The bankworkers came over ‘en bloc’ from the FKTU. Railworkers, postal workers and some transport workers, some subway and bus workers are still in the FKTU.
"The situation with the telecom workers is complicated. The national chair of the union said ‘no’ to all-out strike action this winter although the KTTU became affiliated to the KCTU four years ago. It is a national union but was badly weakened after the big battles of 1995, when it took on Korea Telecom. Before then it had 87 full-timers but now has only thirty seven. The employers, who have ‘traditionally’ paid the wages of union full-timers, took revenge for their defeat and refused to pay any more."
Things are even more difficult in Korea’s massive but shrinking garment industry. Yang II-seok is a 25-year-old full-timer for the Chunggye Garment Workers’ Union. He is responsible for finance in the union and was himself trained as a cutter.
"The average wage in our trade is around one million won (just over $1,000) a month but can go up to around 1,300,000. For machinists on piece-work, it can reach nearer 2 million That is in the periods of intensive work - going hard at it from 9am to 9pm. But there can be six months of lay-off.
"Even on the higher wage it is difficult to live throughout the year on that money. If there is lay-off in the export side of the industry then people try to find work in the middle-sized companies who do work for the home market and pay much less (although it used to be the other way round)... There is no new hiring at the moment; there’s been a big reduction in the work force. Young people see it as ‘3D’ work - dirty, dangerous and difficult.
"Union dues are 10,000 won a month. The full-timers get 250-300,000 - about a third of the average wage or even less. We’re involved in setting up our own co-op to get more money for the union. There are three branches in Seoul but only a few hundred members these days. We cover about 30,000 in the Chunggye area out of a total of 200,000 garment workers. One of our main aims is to form a Seoul area Textile and Garment trade union but as yet that is illegal."
Organising in the small sub-contractors’ sweat shops is still an uphill struggle. Things have changed since 1970 when the workers’ hero Chun Tae-il threw himself as a protest from a bridge in the Chunggye ‘Peace Market’, burning to death and demanding justice for the young women enslaved in the industry. But ten- and 12-hour days in the dust and heat of machine rooms, stuffed to the roofs with made and half-made clothes, does no good to the health or family life of the still mainly female workforce. Thousands produce goods for the same big ‘names’ but are deliberately divided into units of less than five employees through a system of sub-contracting. This ensures they are not covered by any employment law and will be afraid of joining a union, let alone striking, for fear of losing their jobs.
In the hospitals, the independent unions have had more luck. Hyun Chung-hee is chair of the Seoul National University hospital workers’ branch. She was calling in at the union camp.
"With two thousand workers, our medical centre is the largest in Korea... I was a nurse before I was elected to the full-time position... We took strike action for 15 days... 1,200 would attend the daily meetings - that is all except those providing the emergency cover. We will be coming out again on 18th February," she said with great pride, "along with everyone else". Her pager beeped, she apologised, made her farewells and rushed away.