South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
Women workers
Women workers, who were to the fore in establishing the democratic unions in the 1970s, now find themselves thrown out of industries with large workforces (some of which, such as textiles, have declined drastically). Two-thirds now work where there are fewer than five employees and are thus not covered even by the inadequate protection afforded by law. Many toil long hours in the sprawling jungle of the service sector (twice the size of manufacturing) - in the markets or hotels, in hairdressing or secretarial jobs. Over one million are said to work in the "sex industry", forced there by poverty and the lack of real job opportunities. Most companies violate the equal employment laws (even 38% of the larger enterprises - over 300 employees). Discrimination is particularly fierce against married women. In manufacturing, they are mostly confined to unskilled, unhealthy and grossly underpaid assembly work. Hundreds of thousands will bend to a sewing machine all day either in the ‘seclusion’ of their own homes or in vast death-trap rabbit warrens like the ‘Peace Market’ with each room run by a sub-contractor in hock to the big monopolies.
In the "industrialised" world, only in Japan do women get paid a smaller proportion of men’s income than in South Korea. There it is a mere 44%; in South Korea 52% on average. The old peasant attitude persists of regarding females as literally worth less than males. (This is the reason behind the practice continued to the present day of aborting foetuses ‘diagnosed’ as female - in the past by the village soothsayer, today by an electronic scan). They are discriminated against at school, at work and in society.
Gains previously fought for are being undermined, including one day a month menstruation leave. Creches are compulsory only at workplaces with more than 500 employees i.e. very few. Women face higher unemployment levels, almost minimal job security plus sexual harassment at work and even on the picket line. Apart from making undue super-profits for the rich, Korea’s working women are expected to continue with all kinds of "traditional" domestic drudgery and suffer untold levels of domestic violence (against which no legal protection yet exists).
Housing, Education, Health...
Housing for ordinary workers’ families is appallingly inadequate. Many have ‘graduated’ from the shanty towns to little more than garage extensions on someone else’s property. Workers’ flats often consist of one room for a whole family.
Though far fewer than in the ‘70s, tens of thousands still live a ‘cat and mouse’ existence in shacks they build for themselves on the outskirts of the cities. The bull-dozers can move in at any moment to clear the way for ‘developers’. On many occasions they have been accompanied by armed thugs and sometimes whole divisions of riot police to break up the mass protests of the dispossessed. Promises of new homes in the blocks that mushroom out of the wasteland are never fulfilled. A ‘Korea Herald’ editorial in January characterised the government’s attempts to control speculation as like "applying insecticide after the locusts have already devoured the crops - the real estate agents and investors move with such agility."
Rents can take half a worker’s wages. There is no such thing as the welfare state in South Korea. Much of children’s schooling and a large proportion of medical care must be paid for. The cost of education for one child of secondary age is put at around 300,000 won per month. This is more than the statutory minimum wage and about the same amount as unemployment benefit which, is only available for ex-employees of large firms -1.6 % of the total.
Although the general level of unemployment is around 2%, one in ten 15-19 year-olds is unemployed (and without benefit) and 9% of 20-24 year-olds. A larger proportion of South Korea’s young people go on to further education than in the US - 24% - but at the cost of great sacrifice made by their parents. A poor farmer will struggle for years to invest in a cow that he can sell for two million won the day his child gets accepted for university.
Medical insurance and health and safety provisions at work are totally inadequate. A number of doctors, dedicated to transform the situation, have played an important part in the workers’ and democracy movement. One of them, Yang Kil-seung, indicated why:
"When you see the situation in the factories, it’s just like what’s described in the old books of Engels. You know it shouldn’t be that way. You ask workers to join the union and make some kind of action together to change it... That’s what we did in the 1980s. Our group’s name was ‘Action for Workers’ Health and Safety’.
"We would report occupational disease cases and develop organisations amongst victims or people who had been injured in industrial accidents but not compensated or properly treated. There are plenty of them. They lose their fingers, hands, arms and legs.
"There are factory inspectors... about 300 in all of the country. So one guy has to look into more than 500 workplaces in a year. In this area, there are masses of small workshops. We often see bad cuts, lacerations, penetrations from the drilling machines and presses. 75% of press machines are operated illegally, so how can you punish them? It’s 75%, not 5%! In big industries the situation is changing a bit - because of the unions - but without unions there is no protection.
"You only get 70% of the basic wage, which is less than half of the normal salary, for accidents and then only if the company doesn’t wriggle out of it, cover it up. But if someone is off work ill they get either very little or nothing, depending on the size of the firm. They have to pay a large part of their treatment, even if they are covered by insurance. In small firms, there is no cover.
"I was called in to inspect the incidence of occupational disease in a large shipyard. The year before - the worst year - medical reports showed 20 victims. The very next year, when I was invited to check if the medical exam was done correctly or not, they reported 220. And then I added 65 more after reviewing the documents. They were nearly all pneumoconiosis and hearing loss problems. I think this year we can go even further - on organic solvent poisoning."
The day Yang Kil-seung recorded these comments he received a fax at his surgery asking about liver cancer occurring among people working with PVC (polyvinyl chloride).
"This is already well known in European countries and America but this seems to be the first found case in Korea. It’s at a chemical plant in the Kunjan area in the South West, owned by Hang Hwa - a recently emerged Chaebol. 30 of the 60 workers have to boil the PVC materials in a tank and go inside it to clean it every time it is emptied. The government (which runs the workers’ compensation insurance) has said they cannot pay for the cost of the medical treatment since the disease is not recognised. So they are being treated by the general health insurance, which they pay themselves. Such cases are only just coming to light in these ‘developing’ countries."
Another highly respected ‘democratic’ medical practitioner is Kim Rokho, taken to court for "interference with business" when he took his place each day on the picket line at Wonjin Rayon. Workers there had been stricken with a lethal industrial disease caused by carbon disulphide poisoning and were demanding compensation. Getting no response from the heartless management, they took the desperate step of keeping the coffin of one of their fellow sufferers with them at the gates of the factory for nearly 20 weeks. They were victorious in 1993 and the company was forced to close but the work of the campaigners continues as does the court case. This doctor is also known throughout the movement for the clinic/hospital he set up to help workers who cannot afford treatment and to care for victims of police torture.
Immigrant workers
Other activists have taken up the desperate plight of ‘migrant workers’. In the long years of growth with very little unemployment, the South Korean government has made periodic appeals for foreign workers to come to South Korea. The most recent was for 60,000 and there are an estimated 150,000 in the country. They came from Nepal, the Philippines, Pakistan and Indonesia - many in the hope of remitting at least a creditable amount home to their families. In the majority of cases, they have found themselves totally without rights and even without the most basic provision of shelter. Some have been ‘housed’ in container lorries. Many regularly do not receive even the meagre wages due to them.
Harsh Reality
All this and much more constitutes the harsh reality of South Korean capitalism’s fairy-tale success. Now that it faces a dramatic slow-down, the country’s working class knows what is in store. The struggles of the late 1980s took place in the fattest years of South Korea’s development; the lean years promise a long, hard struggle.
But struggle is a way of life for the Korean working class and especially for its activists. The 1996-97 great strike, the first since the second half of the 1940s, may have taken the world by surprise, but it had been a long time in the making. The first truly ‘general’ strike, it had been preceded not only by a vigorous and lengthy campaign against the changes to the Labour law, but by decades of struggle to establish independent and fighting trade unions.