In 1997, the CWI (Committee for a Workers' International) produced a detailed pamphlet reporting from the mass struggles of the South Korean working-class in the winter of 1996/97. With struggle again taking place in South Korea, it seems timely to share the contents of this pamphlet again.
CONTRASTS AND CONTRADICTIONS
Combined and uneven
Its 'tiger leap' into the modern world has made South
Korea a country of enormous contrasts and contradictions. It has produced some of
the most graphic examples of "combined and uneven development" - a
phrase used by Leon Trotsky in his "Theory of Permanent Revolution". He
was describing a feature of countries like Russia at the turn of the century -
'backward' but with some of the most up-to-date factories in the world. To
complete the process of developing the economy and society, he argued, it would
be necessary to clear out not only feudal but capitalist and imperialist
relations by 'going over' to state ownership and planning. The South Korean
economy can no longer be called 'backward', but the speed of its
industrialisation has meant many remnants of the old society from which it has
emerged have not yet been shed.
As recently as 1960, two-thirds of South Korea's population
was engaged in agriculture and just 9% in industry. By 1980, one-third worked
on the land and today less than 15%. In 1960 less than one-quarter of its
people lived in cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants. Today well over three
quarters live in cities of more than 500,000. Only eight countries in the world
are more urbanised than South Korea.
Seoul is one of the three largest cities in Asia, alongside
Shanghai and Tokyo. Crammed between mountains (which have served as a defence
for centuries against the Manchurian invader from the west and the Japanese to
the east), these days it is permanently shrouded in a cloud of pollution. Big black
cars clog up the "expressways" while the pedlar trundles his wares
around in a hand-cart or on the back of a battered motorbike using an upright frame
designed in the middle ages. In the centre of the city, ultra-modern
skyscrapers tower above wooden shacks and hovels. Prestigious air-conditioned
department stores display $1,000 fur coats and French perfumes while teeming
bazaars in the narrow streets nearby are full of shoddy goods and pungent
smells.
The luxury apartment blocks of Akpujong and other 'new rich'
districts contrast starkly with the shanty towns of the urban poor like Nangok
or Shihung. Crowded into the cracks and valleys of the hill-sides are whole
communities of temporary dwellings – the 'favellahs' or shanty towns that some
people say no longer exist. Rows of bright blue 'portaloos' are the only
amenities provided by the authorities. Water must be carried from taps nearby.
Over the past three decades, millions have been forced to exchange a life of
debt and misery in the countryside for some kind of squalid existence in Seoul
or the other major cities.
On the coast, vast industrial complexes have almost literally
risen from the sea in impressive feats of civil engineering and construction
while inland the rice-farmer is endeavouring to scrape a living from his tiny
parcel of land using the tools and techniques of his ancestors. Throughout the
south of the Korean peninsula, a sophisticated urban middle class, which takes
for granted the video and the CD player, the microwave and the mobile
telephone, continues to conduct the family and religious rituals of its
not-too-distant peasant past. In town or country, women will carry their
children strapped to their backs in the traditional manner and can still be
seen balancing huge loads on their heads.
Now, economically one of the most advanced countries
in the world, South Korea is one of the most backward in terms of human rights.
In fact, the brutality of the repression is one of the major contributing
factors to its very economic progress! The rulers who have brought South Korea
into the 20th century have used the terror methods of the emperors (with a few
modern additions) to hold the population in subjection. But docility and compliance
have not been the characteristics of the working people of South Korea. On the
contrary, they have a proud history of revolt against the cruel impositions of
Japanese and US imperialism, military dictatorship and of the giant Korean conglomerates.
This strike has conclusively demonstrated the capacity of
the working class to play a leading role in changing society or, as Marx and
Engels put it, that of "grave-digger" of the very system that has forced
it into being. And the class it confronts seems to have been created ready-made
with power and wealth ostentatiously and corruptly concentrated in the hands of
a few monopoly-owning 'dynasties' - the founders of the Chaebol and their
immediate family.
"Chaebol Economy"
Thirty giant conglomerates dominate the South Korean
economy. Their turnover, according to research publicised in an April 1997 Le
Monde Diplomatique, is equal to 4/5ths of the country's Gross National Product
or GNP. They own more than 40% of all the country's assets in industry, agriculture,
commerce and the service sector. Ten of them account for 50% of all exports.
The extent of the concentration of power in the economy is
indicated by the fact that just four "Super Chaebol" - Daewoo,
Samsung, Hyundai and Lucky Gold Star - have combined sales equal to half of
GNP. Daewoo's turnover is now over $52 billion a year (greater than that of
other world giants - Unilever and Nestlé). Samsung has 48 principal affiliates,
making anything from semi-conductors to loaves of bread and aeroplanes to
shirts. It runs insurance and advertising firms and has just gone into
car-making. It even has its own chain of cinemas.
Hyundai virtually 'owns' the city of Ulsan - a city with
'metropolitan' status equivalent to that of a province. The company dominates
the lives of the more than 700,000 citizens from the cradle to the grave.
One-third of all adults work in its ship-building, heavy- and
precision-engineering or car factories. Most of what they get in their pay
packets will go straight back to Hyundai. It owns the schools, colleges, shops,
department stores and hospitals. It builds the apartments and runs the cultural
centres and of course has a monopoly of the vehicles on the road. One of its
founder's sons - Chung Mong-jun -'represents' Ulsan in the National Assembly.
The grandiose library that overlooks the city was graciously
"donated" by Hyundai. Way below, on the shore-line of the East Sea,
beyond the ugly blocks of workers' flats, stands "Goliath" - the
giant gantry crane, known and loved throughout Korea as a symbol of workers'
resistance. In the great shipyard strike of 1989 it was occupied for more than
100 days until a full-scale military operation was mounted from land, sea and
air to end the strike.
Out of nothing in no time
Thirty years ago this great industrial city was no more than
a fishing village, Indeed, there was no shipbuilding industry in the whole of
Korea at that time, no car factories, no microelectronics and no steel
industry. Even the Chaebol hardly existed. In 1974 all of them together
accounted for no more than 15% of sales. So where did they come from and how did
they create their vast empires? They and their achievements were by no means a
product of the unfettered working of the capitalist market system. If that were
the case, how is it that countries on a par with Korea in 1960 have trailed so
far behind and others in the "Third World' have failed totally to emulate
its spectacular achievements?
From building no ships in 1973, Hyundai became the world's biggest
ship builder. With no knowledge of the industry in 1968, Posco Iron &
Steel became the sixth largest steel maker in the world. South Korea has been
the fifth largest car-producing country for some time and Daewoo is now aiming
to produce two million cars a year world-wide.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, industry and manufacturing
in South Korea was growing twice as fast as in comparable "middle-income
oil importing economies" (World Development Report 1982). Between 1960 and
1970 exports grew at 34% a year. At the beginning of that decade fuels,
minerals and metals accounted for 30% of exports; in 1979, one per cent. At the
beginning of that period, no machinery or transport equipment was exported; by
1979 they constituted 20% of all exports. By then, other manufactures and clothing
accounted for 69%
Designated as a "low income" country by the World Bank
in 1960, South Korea had a per capita income of $82. By 1994 it was more than a
hundred times that figure and last year GDP per head was $11,910. Even though
the mass of the population has not received anything like an equal share of the
benefits, the average male in his '20s in South Korea is now a full five inches
taller than he would have been in 1962.
Unrepeatable
The very favourable treatment of Korean capitalism by the US
and later by Japan is an important factor in its success but one which is also
fast turning into its opposite. The combination of circumstances that lies
behind the special status given to South Korea cannot be repeated to order in
any other country. The balance of forces in world relations has dramatically
changed now that nearly all the workers' states based on Stalinist distortions
of socialist ideas have collapsed. Even though the 'rogue' regime in Northern
Korea remains the 'odd one out' in that it does not seem, up to now, to have
been taking the same capitalist road as its neighbours, it is no longer linked
to a chain of regimes based on a system that is totally antagonistic to
capitalism. Its economy could very rapidly simply implode and be laid open to
all sorts of predators.
The regime of Kim Jong-il, son of Kim Il-sung, is reckoned
to spend a huge amount of its budget on defence including its nuclear weaponry
and regularly threatens military action. But in its severely weakened state it
would have difficulty carrying anything out. Southern governments hold regular
civil defence drills, with mock air raids etc. probably more as propaganda
exercises than out of serious concern for the safety of the population. The
threat of invasion is as good an excuse as any for putting patrols of armed
soldiers on the streets, organising road blocks and doing identity card checks.
These days, the dire economic situation in the North makes
state ownership and planning look much less attractive to workers in the South
than it did in the period just after World War II. Then, it meant a rapid
development of the considerable natural resources of the area while the
capitalist South was floundering. At that time things were quite different in
many respects. While not socialist, Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe - one-party dictatorships resting on state ownership and planning - had
been strengthened. China was ‘lost’ to imperialism as private ownership of land
and industry had been eliminated. A whole number of countries in South East
Asia, including Korea, were threatening to follow suit like 'dominoes'. It was
undoubtedly in the strategic interests of world capitalism to create a bulwark
against the spread of 'communism' in the whole region and to hold the
revolutionary working class of Korea in check.
At one stage, the US was pouring in technical and financial
aid to the South at the rate of $2.2 billion a year. It kept tens of thousands
of troops in the country after the Korean War (and up to the present day). It
was party to the establishment of the murderous Park Chung-hee and Chun
Doo-hwan military dictatorships in 1961 and 1980 respectively - both of them
notorious for crushing in blood uprisings, demonstrations and strikes.
"Communist threat"
The real reason for maintaining this 'presence", was
blurted out by President Truman's special advisor, Edwin Pauley, when he
warned, "Communism in Korea could get off to a better start than
practically anywhere else in the world", A US commander admitted in 1945:
"When we came in, we found the communists actually ruling and controlling
South Korea". Russian troops had been advancing from the North for some
time but a genuinely popular rising was under way. In the brief period between
the collapse of the Japanese war effort and the arrival of US troops, workers
had begun to take control over their workplaces, to form unions and to take
responsibility for management. Peasant unions were organising land take-overs
and rice collection, storage and distribution.
Korean communists had built their own party and fought
throughout the 1920s and 1930s to organise trade unions in the teeth of
atrocious state terror from the Japanese occupiers. Now their movement was
coming into its own. But it was not only US imperialism who feared the victory
of a workers' and peasants' revolution in the Korean peninsula.
The establishment of genuine socialist democracy in any
country and an appeal for workers elsewhere to do the same would have sounded
the death knell for the parasitic elite ruling the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Stalinism
Contrary to the much-peddled scare stories about ‘reds under
the bed’ plotting revolutions everywhere, the bureaucracy that had usurped
power in Moscow on the basis of the revolution being isolated to a backward
country, worked through its domination of the "Communist Parties"
internationally to prevent workers taking control in society. Notably in China
in the 1920s, Spain and France in the 1930s, when there were heroic
revolutionary movements, it insisted on treacherous tactics that tied the
workers' organisations to the political representatives of its own exploiters –
the owners of industry, finance, land.
State-owned, planned economies were established, in post-war
Eastern Europe, China and so on, following popular revolts and the virtual
'flight' of capitalism. But, with a heavy involvement of the "Red Army' of
the Soviet Union, or in the case of China, its own peasant-based army, from the
beginning they were under the tight control of a developing authoritarian
bureaucratic elite. Fig-leaf 'coalition' governments were artificially cobbled
together. Behind them, a ruthless policy was pursued of physically excluding
from power not only what remained of the bourgeoisie but the workers too.
Regimes were set up in the image of Moscow's centrally controlled society. In
the Soviet Union, Stalin maintained the state terror that he had used to crush
all opposition and all the elements of workers' democracy established by the
Bolshevik revolution.
Carve-up
Now, in Northern Korea, Stalin was as anxious as the US
imperialists to find moderate figures through whom to operate to stem the
movement from below. Attempts to set up provisional compromise governments were
not faring well. With indecent haste, he agreed with the US generals' proposals
to carve-up the Korean Peninsula along the 38th parallel, even
though 'communist' and insurgent forces were in control far to the South of it.
A congress in Seoul in September 1945 was attended by
approximately one thousand delegates from North and South. A 'Korean People's
Republic' was proclaimed. Its programme included the nationalisation of all
basic heavy industries, natural resources, means of communication and
transportation; the establishment of compulsory primary education and a
guarantee of basic human rights, freedom of the press, assembly and religion.
The task of the US War Department, having drawn its line
across the body of the country, was to move rapidly to put an end to this
uprising and to impose the Syngman Rhee government on South Korea. Moscow was
forced to settle for Kim Il-sung in the North. Remaining decidedly in the
anti-imperialist camp - retaining state ownership of industry and carrying
through rapid collectivisation – he developed a highly personal form of
'Bonapartist' rule. The three main groupings in the 'communist' movement were systematically
physically eliminated - first the Korean, then the Yenan (Chinese) returnees,
and lastly even the wing most closely allied to Moscow!
Korean War
The Kim Il-sung clique was then in a position to make a push
for the South with the idea of extending their own influence and not at all of
encouraging genuine independent class action. Imperialism's motives were to
defend landlordism and capitalism in the South and to restore it in the North.
War became inevitable on the Korean peninsula and broke out in 1950. By 1953
when it ended more than three million Korean civilians had been killed and
hundreds of thousands of soldiers. (One million Chinese soldiers also died).
There were many heroic struggles up to and during the Korean
War. In each one of them, the leaders would demand the restoration of the
people's committees, land redistribution and unification of the country. US
forces were still fighting guerrillas throughout South Korea until well into
1952. Their actions were combined with wave upon wave of mass political
executions carried out under the orders of their puppet, Syngman Rhee. Over
100,000 were rounded up and slaughtered in the immediate period after the US
presence had restored him to power for a second 'term' in 1950. (This campaign alone
eliminated more people than the US claimed to have been murdered by
'communists' North and South during the whole war).
No organised left political forces remained in the South at
the end of the Korean War. Yet, before long, as if rising from the ashes, there
were once again powerful movements of workers and students for "unification
of the country and socialism'. They could only be contained by the heaviest of
state repression and the American presence.
In his authoritative book, 'Rush to Development", Martin
Hart-Landsberg explains: "Rule by military dictatorship was a logical
consequence of the illegitimacy of the entire US project to create a separate
South Korea; it could be saved in no other way". But he goes on to show
how the building of Korea's modern industries did not figure in the plans of
American imperialism but was the deliberate decision of a military caste
determined to grow rich on the proceeds. Quite cynically and methodically it
would use its 'special (favoured ) status' to build the basis for becoming
independent of its 'sponsors'. Opting for the capitalist road, it would
literally have to create a capitalist class to fill the vacuum that existed
after the collapse of Japanese imperialism and the end of 40 years' foreign
domination in every sphere of life.
Theories on trial
Spectacular results were achieved, effectively on the basis
of the defeat of the Korean revolution. Do they disprove the theory that
isolated, underdeveloped countries cannot "catch up" with advanced industrial
economies in terms of technique and productive capacity except on the basis of
a state-owned, planned economy?
Special factors obviously prompted the largest imperialist
power to set aside considerable resources to build its defences in that region
and, in the process, develop the country to some extent. The special trading
concessions, the big expansion into Korea of Japanese capitalism and even the
land reforms pushed through under US tutelage to stave off peasant uprisings
went a long way towards making South Korea an exception that proves the rule.
But it is now widely accepted, and confirmed again in a March 1997 'Policy
Review published in London by the 'Overseas Development Institute', that the
single most important factor behind South Korea's 'miraculous' development
(and, to some extent that of the other "Asian Tigers') was, after all, the
state.
Although located firmly in the camp of capitalist nations,
with a developed and very concentrated class of owners, the 'Chaebol economy'
was by no means an example of unregulated laissez faire capitalism. On the
contrary, there was here an exceptional involvement of the state in
every aspect of economic as well as social life. The bourgeois state was even
prepared to sacrifice some of "its own" when necessary and limit the
freedom of the Chaebol themselves in order to keep the whole show on the road.
Interestingly enough, when the military took over in 1961, a
group of colonels is said to have looked at the parlous state of the economy -
especially compared to that of the North, which was going ahead – and developed
a draft plan based on state ownership and principles of self-reliance. It was
shredded for fear of US disapproval! Nevertheless, the Five Year Plans adopted
by the military regimes and the targeting of investment in heavy industries
achieved results through using methods strongly resembling those of the
bureaucratically-run, state-owned economies of the Stalinist camp. In the early
1970s, 12 of the country's 16 largest firms were actually state-owned and,
ignoring Western advice and risking US ire, the Park regime used the
state-owned banks to direct loans into six totally new industries -
petrochemicals, electronics, iron and steel, machinery, ships, and other
transport equipment.
State-dominated capitalism
But, although it was possible to subsidise whole sectors of
the economy while they got started, or even when they faltered, it was always
on the basis of either quite brutally penalising other sectors or by
overdrawing on both domestic and foreign finances. However state-dominated, it
was impossible for the Chaebol economy to escape the scourges of a system based
on private profit. The headlong drive for expansion at all costs actually
aggravates the crises. It ends up with productive capacity considerably in
excess of actual demand - domestic or international. Workers within the country
cannot buy back the products of their labour, since the bosses hold their wages
so far below the value they create. A country that depends so much on trade is
highly vulnerable when those crises occur elsewhere in the capitalist world but
also when unfavourable changes in the prices of raw materials and of
manufactured products result, precisely from the ruinous 'free play of market
forces'.
Although not suffering as seriously the periodic crises that
afflicted other capitalist countries in the 1970s and 1980s, South Korea was
not immune to 'cyclical' dips in growth rates. Now it faces actual recession
caused by the vagaries of the market - domestic as well as international. By
continuing to pay appallingly low wages and putting precious little into
welfare spending, Korean capitalism has severely restricted demand at home.
Wages in the newer industries with large workforces have increased dramatically
in the past ten years – about 150%. This is not some automatic result of the 'globalisation'
process but of bitter and persistent struggle on the part of the newly
organised workers in these industries. The majority of Koreans work in low-paid
service jobs. At least five million are not on any payroll and 2 million work
on the land.
Producing for the foreign market, therefore, while consuming
vast amounts of 'start-up' capital, has nevertheless been the quickest way for
'Korea Inc.' to make its profits. Exports increased by 800% in 30 years.
But the heavy dependence on selling abroad to fuel the dazzling growth rates
has built another fatal flaw into the foundations of the economy. It has made
it particularly vulnerable to the effects of down-turns in other parts of the
capitalist world. It is also highly susceptible to fluctuations in markets and
prices. South Korea controls 35% of the world memory chip market but last year
the world price of a 'direct random-access memory' (DRAM) semi-conductor fell
drastically to $8 from $84 a year before.
South Korean capitalism, far from enjoying a privileged
status in its dealings with the USA and Japan, now suffers from aggressive
protectionist measures on the part of its trading 'partners'. They retaliate
against cheap goods with anti-'dumping' rules. It suffers adverse effects when
the Japanese yen falls against the dollar, increasing the competitive edge of
Japanese products – including cars and ships - in the USA and elsewhere. Also,
as the second biggest recipient of exports from Australia, South Korea pays
heavily when the government in Canberra moves to strengthen its currency.
Even the features in the South Korean economy that bear an
outward resemblance to those of a Stalinist state have turned from being
advantages to disadvantages. As there, the emphasis on quantity rather than
quality has led to an inability to adapt to, and develop, new technology. This
problem is compounded in Korea by the fact that much of its "miracle"
growth was due to the use of Japanese technology borrowed under contract. Now
that Japan sees South Korea as a rival rather than an offshore production base
for its own firms, these contracts are not being renewed. The big firms are now
either having to drive into the 'lower quality' markets of South and Central
America, Eastern Europe, China and Asia or invest vast sums to develop their
own technology ... or both.
Overblown
All the strengths of the 'special' breed of capitalism that
developed so rapidly in this South East Asian peninsula are now turning into
its weaknesses and the giant conglomerates are themselves spreading into the
global economy. Pressures are being exerted from foreign capital to lift the
thousands of obstructive regulations and the blatantly protectionist measures
operated by the state. The fact that the Chaebol's rapid expansion has been based
on loans rather than investment has also been a double-edged sword. Most firms
have borrowed at least three times more than their asset value and some to a
far greater extent. In the case of Hanbo, the 14th largest Chaebol that
collapsed in January, it was 20 times. Sammi Steel has also collapsed under its
debt burden and other conglomerates are said to be dangerously overblown.
The state itself has the second biggest national debt after
the US of $104 billion. The lack of resources put into research and development
and the absence of a 'home-grown' machine tool industry has meant Korean
capitalism has had to pay for its spectacular export record with a spectacular
level of imports of energy (40%), capital goods and components. In 1995 imports
increased by 32% in one year to a total of $144billion.
It is a myth that the special status of South Korea meant
massive investment from abroad in capital goods development. Most of the money
put into Korea in the post-war period was in the form of 'aid' (including
military) and loans. In addition, there were special foreign exchange and trade
terms which gave South Korean goods disproportionate access particularly to US
and Japanese markets. Now that world relations have changed, following the
collapse of the state-owned planned economies, US and Japanese governments no
longer need to bolster the South Korean economy.
In fact, for some years now, they have come to regard South
Korea as a dangerous competitor on the world market. As well as the removal of
the strategic reasons for propping up Korean capitalism, the slow-down in world
trade and the difficulties experienced by most capitalist economies has intensified
competition.
The US has for a long time been engineering more and more
trade disputes, even before general hostilities in the 'Cold War' ceased. Japan
has stepped up the withdrawal of its technical 'know-how'. The Frankenstein's
monster they had helped to nurture had developed too many of the attributes of
its creators - an appetite for profits, an ability to compete and an awkward
propensity to try and defend its own interests. Tight monetary policies aimed
at cooling the over-heating economies of China, Malaysia and Thailand also hit
trade with South Korea.
Protection racket
The state's protection of the Chaebol conglomerates is
another double-edged sword. When they are in favour with the ruling party, they
can expand and prosper far beyond their 'natural' limits. But when they fall
out of favour, they can be broken or, at best, severely weakened for a whole
period.
In 1984 the founder/ owner of the Kukje-ICC group made the
mistake of only donating $400,000 to the ‘New Village’ movement of
dictator Chun Doo-hwan, when the other large Chaebol-owners had been persuaded
to give over $1 million. The empire was brought crashing down and its component
parts redistributed to all the better-behaved conglomerates. Only later (after
the General was murdered by the CIA and a new dictator came to power), did the
owning family's fortunes revive. The company reassembled and regained at least
some of its former position.
Hanbo, on the other hand, even after its collapse, continues
to receive vast handouts. A government that wants to see the completion of its
prestigious new Tonjin steel mill is busily constructing feeder road and rail
links to the 'green field' site. All the pieces of this broken conglomerate are
being picked up by other Chaebol predators in the field (and even some not yet
in that particular field). The government bailed out the now private banks
affected to the tune of $7.1 billion, thus dramatically inflating its already
massive budget deficit.
While formally freeing trade and opening up to foreign
goods, the South Korean government is desperately trying to hold the lid on
imports. The latest moral crusade against "luxury" goods has angered
the US Trade Department which suspects it is aimed at protecting domestic
producers. But now that more of Korea's exports go to Asian countries than to
the United States, the slowing down in the economies of all these countries is
heightening tensions between them - including with China which was on its way
to taking more South Korean exports than the US. (In the period 1987-94 exports
to Asia increased by four and a half times to $25.8billion, to the US 12% to
$20.5 billion and to China 38 times to $8 billion. In 1996, exports to the
United States fell to just over $10billion).
Problems
In 1995 exports to developed countries were still growing -
at a rate of 28%. A year later they were down by more than 8%. Semi-conductors
account for 20% of South Korea's exports. Last year sales of them abroad fell a
dramatic 44%. There was also a substantial decrease in sales of chemicals and
steel and a poor performance in most other fields. Domestic demand for
electrical home appliances was also down and, according to 'Economic Report',
heavy industry and chemicals were "anaemic" and over-capacity was now
afflicting whole swathes of the economy. All this spells disaster for
"Korea Inc." The country's trading deficit has doubled in the past
year. At $23.7 billion it is the second highest in the world.
The National Debt has gone over the $100 billion which, as
'Business Koren' noted, was double what it was at the time of Kim Young-sam's
inauguration in1993. Now, according to the government's own estimates, it could
reach $144 billion by the end of 1997. Interest and repayments on it cost $10.1
billion per annum - interest alone amounting to nearly 13% of the national
budget. Offshore borrowing costs $7 billion in interest. Foreign direct
investment, which has always been a small proportion of total investment, is
actually declining from a high point of no more than $1.5 billion. South Korea
ranks second only to India for discrimination against foreign investment
according to the Hong Kong based 'Political and Economic Risk Consultancy'.
Investment by the top 200 Korean companies was expected to
fall in absolute terms this year when only two years ago it was increasing at a
rate of 47%. Meanwhile, these same firms have been doubling their own overseas
direct investment and in the case of 'information and communications' and
'machinery', trebling and quadrupling it.
In the field of labour-intensive production like clothes and
shoes, some South Korean firms (and some famous American and Japanese 'names'
previously operating in South Korea) have moved to lower wage economies in the
region and elsewhere. Capital-intensive industries regard easier access to
markets as a more important consideration. Although cars form a substantial
share of South Korea's exports, they still represent only 1.9% of total sales
in Europe. Companies like Daewoo are looking for ways of getting into that
market. If they set up factories in Europe itself, they not only get round the
EU external trade barriers but bring down the cost of transporting the final
product to its destination. Even where wages are higher than in Korea, these
other considerations can be more important in the investment decisions of the Chaebol.
SOUTH KOREA'S "SECRET"
The world's press has made great play of the massive rise
in wages in South Korea over the past ten years, particularly in the
metal-working and engineering industries - 15% per annum on average. The unions
began to take advantage of the late 1980s boom and organised to pull themselves
out of their 'Third World' conditions.
But a Daewoo workers' leader at the KCTU's February
conference indicated what has been perhaps the biggest secret of Korea's
"miracle". Even after ten years of struggle and improvements, it is still
South Korea's workers who pay the biggest price to keep it going.
He spoke of the 12-hour shifts, six days a week. He pointed
to every part of his body to indicate the muscles and limbs that have
"gone" by the age of 40. He spoke of the super-profits and the
arrogance of the bosses that made his blood boil. This is what lies behind the
Korean workers' anger that reached breaking point at the end of last year. At
this delegate's factory in Bupyong, 92% had voted for strike action and every
one of the more than 10,000 workers had been out solid.
If South Korean capitalism came near to the highest levels
of growth in history, it still depends more on the intensive exploitation of
its workers than on the latest developments in equipment for helping them do
their job. The average South Korean works with only two-fifths the amount of
capital available to his American counterpart and even in the modern car factories,
has much less equipment at his elbow.
The well-named 'evil' laws pushed through parliament, show
that the South Korean bosses intend to keep things that way. The whole burden
of the government's propaganda has been that the economy demands sacrifices as
the growth rate falls yet further. In 1995 it was 9% per annum, in 1996 it was 6.8%
and in 1997 heading for 5% or less. (One journal makes out that 4% would
actually mean entering a period of nil or "negative" growth, i.e. an
actual decline.)
Dream or nightmare?
For the majority of workers, the "dream" is easily
explained; for them it has been a nightmare. In terms of the way South Korean
capitalism treats its workers it is a long way from 'catching up' with the
far-from-adequate standards of its fellow OECD member-states. In fact, figures
indicate the opposite. The 1995 International Labour Organisation (ILO) in its
Year Book, for example, shows that workers in South Korea work longer hours
than in 61 out of the 68 countries it reviewed. Only countries like Indonesia,
Sri Lanka, Taiwan have a worse record.
A leader of Seoul's subway workers, at a KCTU demonstration
on 2nd February beside the Central Station explained why his members are in the
"vanguard of the movement" as he puts it:
"Day shifts are ten hours; nights 14 with some of
the most gruelling shift patterns imaginable - two days, two nights, two days,
one night, rotation day, holiday and back to the beginning again ... In 1994 we
led a struggle against the government's wage freeze and suffered police action
worse than under the military. It is still illegal for us in the public sector
to strike. Forty-six of the activists were arrested and 16 'did time'. Nearly
3000 were victimised in some way by management and over 100 were sacked.
Leaders of the union staged a week-long hunger strike at Myong Dong. Some of
the (subway) lines are organised by the FKTU and that complicates our struggle.
But we will not see our union crushed. We aim to stay in the front ranks."
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 bulldozers 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 that'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 Hia - 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.
Fighters and collaborators
The origins of both the KCTU and the FKTU can be traced back
at least to the revolutionary period at the end of the second world war when
capitalism in Korea was fighting for survival.
According to the KCTU's own account, when the independent
'Korea National Council of Trade Unions' was formed in November 1945, it "supported
revolutionary socialists" and put forward the demand to the American
military administration that "complete control be allowed by the workers'
factory committees over enterprises formerly owned by the Japanese and pro-Japanese
Koreans". It played an important role in the great September strike of
1946, followed by the March strike of 1947, and the one-day general strikes of February
and May 1948.
The Korean Labour Federation for Independence, on the other
hand, a forerunner of the FKTU, was set up in 1946 with the aim not of
liberating but of controlling the working class - a tool of the bosses. It loudly
declared its total hostility to socialism and actively promoted co-operation
between labour and management. In this it had the full backing of the government,
the bosses and the American military up to and during the Korean war of
1950-53. Everything was done in this period to stem the tide of popular
uprising and a take-over of society by the Korean working class.
Such was the force of the movement from below that this
devastating war would never have been inflicted on the people of Korea if they
had been left to decide their own fate. Bruce Cummings and Jon Halliday in their
book ‘Korea: The Unknown War’ maintain that without US intervention, there
would have been a "revolutionary transformation of society". Large elements
of workers' direct democracy had no doubt been established throughout the
South, often before the Northern army arrived. Whether the "communists"
of North Korea, the USSR or China would have succeeded in imposing their bureaucratic
model is another question. But the intervention of US imperialism and, during
the Korean War, soldiers from 16 other capitalist countries under the flag of
the United Nations, caused the atrocious carnage that has left a legacy of hatred
against imperialism.
During the Korean War, there were heroic strikes by textile
workers, miners and dock-workers. The latter attempted to boycott the transport
of military supplies. The struggle for free and democratic trade unions
continued unabated throughout the long harsh years of the Syngman Rhee regime.
In 1956, two million votes were given to a candidate standing for socialist
democracy and a planned economy - Cho Pong-am. Two years later, Rhee had him executed
for "collaboration with North Korea". Then, on the pretext of
imminent invasion, he moved to push 22 bills through parliament including revision
of the National Security law. He had all opposition parliamentarians removed
from the Assembly by police trained in the martial arts. When in 1960 he was
seen to use ballot rigging and sheer terror tactics to prevent the re-election
of an opposition vice-president Chang Myon, students poured onto the streets in
protest. The police turned on them with live ammunition, killing over 100. This
only drove them to more protest action and brought others into the movement.
When martial law was declared, the Korean army refused to fire on the students,
many of whom demonstrated under the slogan "Democracy in Politics and
Equality in the Economy".
The "April (students') Revolution" of 1960 gave enormous
impetus to the struggle for fighting workplace organisations. In the ten months
after Rhee was forced into exile there were around 2,000 street demonstrations
involving a million people. Cho Pong-am's Progressive Party became the Socialist
Mass Party and joined forces with student, trade union and other organisations
to demand the establishment of ties with the North and elections to re-unify
the country. Early in 1961, the students again took the lead and mobilised
support for a conference of delegates from North and South. Just four days before
it was due to take place, a group of army officers under Major General Park
Chung-hee, with the blessing of Washington, carried through a coup d'etat, and
the labour movement was once again crushed.
The Korea Labour and Society Institute (KLSI) in a history
of the trade union movement explains how, after being disbanded along with all
political parties and socialist groups, the unions went through a process of
"dissolution, reorganisation and expansion" in the 1960s and 1970s.
They were re-established from the top only by orders of the military in 1961
through its Union Reorganisation Committee. The FKTU was the result and was
paidfor by the American CIA.
Thus formed, in the words of the KLSI, it "fell down completely"
in its obligations to the working class of Korea. It openly collaborated with
the repression carried out by Park and the military. It has never been
forgiven. Bitter feelings towards what was known in the movement as this
"yellow dog" union federation persist today and have been sustained
by the 'lesser' crimes of the more recent period. In 1987, its leaders swore a
loyalty oath to the military dictatorship. It regularly receives financial assistance
from the government of Kim Young-sam (of up to $7 billion per annum). When
South Korea was accepted into the OECD, it participated in a government
delegation to the ILO, white-washing the state's use of the military against
(KCTU) strikers.
The whole period of the 1960s, '70s and '80s was characterised
by an unending round of struggle and repression - more struggle meant more
repression, more repression meant more struggle. Compressed into three decades
were processes which had developed over three centuries in the world's first
industrialised nation - Britain. As in all countries in the early days of
capitalism, industrialisation was producing an ever-growing army of
wage-slaves. Their cruel treatment at the hands of the factory-owners would push
them into 'combining' together for protection. Every attempt would be
persecuted, driven underground into 'secret societies' and labelled as
'conspiracies' against the state itself.
The first unions would have difficulty getting beyond the
factory level before they were crushed. But the harshness of conditions would
send workers again and again down the path of organising until, at last,
powerful regional and national bodies could be formed. As soon as the pace of
industrialisation quickened, the labour disputes multiplied. There were just 95
in 1959 and by the very next year, 227. In October of 1961, 100,000 workers
were organised into trade unions. Ten years later, half a million and by 1979,
the year of Park's assassination, more than one million.
Kwangju
In 1980 came the most horrific event of recent South Korean
history - the drowning in blood of a popular uprising in Cholla Province. In
revolt against the imposition of yet another dictatorship - that of General
Chun Doo-hwan - and its brutal treatment of protesting students, the people of
Kwangju rose up and took control of their city. They were disciplined, peaceful
but armed. Local miners supplied dynamite from the pits as an extra defence against
the paratroopers who had gone in and run amok. For days the "Commune"
held out against the forces of the state. Then, on May 27th, with the total collusion
of US 'advisers', acting in consultation with Washington, Chun Doo-hwan ordered
in the 20th Division of the army that proceeded to inflict the most horrible
terror and carnage. In total, well over 2,000 men, women and children were slaughtered
in the crushing of the 'Commune' and 15,000 more maimed - some mutilated in the
most barbarous fashion.
The atrocity would never be forgotten or forgiven. In its
aftermath, the military moved in a pre-emptive strike against the labour
movement. The leaders of both trade union federations were removed by edict from
their posts. Thousands of local union branches were dissolved and union
officers sacked, arrested and sent to military-run "education camps".
From then on no federations or industrial unions were permitted by law; only
workplace or company unions were allowed and then only one on any site.
Once more, however, the workers of South Korea showed they
would not be cowed. Within a matter of years - by 1984 - an economic slow-down
had given way to a new upturn in the economy. There was a corresponding upturn
in the workers' movement. New struggles arose - for wage increases,
improvements in working conditions, the establishment of independent unions and
for the democratisation of the government/company unions. But, constantly
harassed and persecuted by the state, it would still be more than ten years
before the founding of the present-day KCTU.
The Korean workers have fought, been crushed, regrouped and
fought again. They have demonstrated with particular courage and tenacity that
iron law of capitalist society - that workers will not cease their struggle to
throw off the yoke of capitalist exploitation. They have their pioneers and martyrs
like the worker-hero Chun Tae-il and the women of Dong-il Textiles who fought
long and hard against a ruthless employer, the forces of the state and the
leaders of their own FKTU union. The movement will have its ebbs and flows.
There will be defeats, pauses and victories all contributing to the emergence
of powerful workers' organisations.
The students, too, had their pioneers and martyrs: Kim
Sang-jin in the 1970s and Cho Sung-man, Park Jong-chol and Lee Han-yol in the
1980s - all of whom paid with their lives in a struggle to rid society of dictators
and imperialist domination. Coming from the more privileged sections of
society, students were nevertheless deeply affected by what they saw around
them. That and their own experiences at the hands of the state machine
convinced them of the ideas of class struggle and socialism. They would go to
the countryside or into the workshops to share the life of the factory worker
or the village labourer in the manner of the Narodniks in Russia at the end of
the last century. They would agitate, educate, and organise and end up in jail.
There, their understanding of Marxism was deepened. As so often happens, the
prisons of the dictators become the universities of socialism.
Some of the most poignant and best-loved 'struggle songs'
were written by the widely known composer Kim Ho-chul. He had first hand
experience of how the regime treated its 'dissident elements' in the 1980s:
"We were constantly being arrested and kept for months
without anyone being informed of where we were. And always the torture. It
comes back to you. At night you remember. One time I was tied up like a chicken
with leather belts and suspended from the ceiling. They would pour hot peppery
sauce down your nose. You could only retch. You thought it would never stop and
you would not survive ... When you came out you looked for your friends. Some
turned up, some have still not turned up and some will never turn up".
The Great Struggle
But then came 1987 and "The Great Struggle" that
welled up from below. It started first among the students, angered by the death
of yet another of their comrades at the hands of the hated secret police. It
spread like wildfire. Every layer of society thronged onto the demonstrations
in their millions, demanding democracy and an end to dictatorship. South
Korea's fabulous economic growth had not only been produced on the backs of the
working class. The middle layers in society had felt little of the gains and
resented the lack of basic freedoms. Even the stockbrokers joined the
demonstrations.
For weeks the whole nation seemed to be on the streets.
There were battles and injuries, mass arrests and even another death at the
hands of the 'Security' police, but the regime was now fighting for its life.
In some instances young soldiers came over to the side of the movement, sick of
the way they were treated in Chun's army. After 40 years of military rule, with
hardly a moment's respite, it seemed as if a whole era was coming to an end.
Day after day, the students were on the demonstrations,
often joined by workers and sometimes actually over-powering the hated riot police.
The movement was essentially aimed at ending dictatorship and establishing the
basic democratic rights that all bourgeois revolutions have inscribed on their
banner - freedom of speech, assembly, press and organisation. Not only were the
days of the dictators numbered but the longer the battle continued, the more
attractive became the idea of doing away with the very system they protected.
It was clear that in the hot-house conditions of the Great Struggle the ideas
of socialism were coming to the fore.
General Chun Doo-hwan was forced to accept standing down in
favour of civilian rule. From the point of view of the bourgeois, democracy is
anyway preferable and cheaper. Chun's successor, Roh Tae Woo - unlike the joint
leaders of the opposition party, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae Jung - had no democratic
'credentials', He had in fact been an accomplice of Chun Doo-hwan's in the
bloody suppression of the "Kwangju Commune". Nevertheless,
circumstances obliged him to come out with elaborate promises to change the old
order - direct elections, freedom of the press, the release of all political
prisoners, the restoration of civil liberties, an attack on corruption and the
reform of education and local government. As before, faced with revolution, the
ruling class preferred reform.
Impetus to workers' movement
The forces of the state had been humiliated but the rule of
capital survived. Without its complete eradication, these basic rights could
not be guaranteed. Illusions would persist in the power of democracy to solve
the myriad problems in society, but many would now see socialism as the only alternative.
The Marxists of the Committee for a Workers' International predicted in the
summer of 1987, in the Militant International Review, that the Korean workers
would rapidly 'enter the fray' and make use of this period, striving once again
to create powerful weapons for their own battles – democratic fighting unions
and parties to represent their class interests.
The enormous access of confidence is reflected in the figures.
The number of company level unions increased by three times from 1987 to 1993
reaching a total of 7,147 with a membership of nearly two million. The number
of organised workers rose in the first half of 1987 by 2.5% but by December was
up by 49.6% and again in 1988 by 50.2%. The number of strikes rose from 276 in
1986 to 3,749 in 1987. In the two years after the Great Struggle they were at
the level of 1,878 and 1,616. Nominal wages grew by 25% in 1989.
The success of the struggles on pay, hours, holidays etc, in
the context of a still booming South Korean economy, helped forge a broader
movement. Disregarding the strictures of the labour law, worker-militants
formed regional, industrial and national trade union bodies. These developments
were matched on the political plane with intense activity in the underground -
much of it based on socialist teachings - and in attempts to overcome the numerous
obstacles to standing candidates of the working class in elections and building
a workers' party.
In the presidential elections of 1988 and again in1992, a
revered veteran of the Labour movement, Pack Ki-wan, stood as the candidate of
a "Progressive Party". He was known as a socialist, but did not use
the term in his campaigns for legal reasons. (After the collapse of the planned
economies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, like many other activists in the
movement, he questioned the viability of socialism). Perhaps as a reaction
against dogmatism, Pack Ki-wan's party was a broad coalition of diverse elements
that put forward a 100 point programme. Politically limited, excluded from the
media and generally hampered by the state, it failed to gather even the 3% of
the popular vote needed by law to stay in existence after the elections and was
dissolved.
In Assembly elections last year, the KCTU found ways of
ensuring there were some independent candidates standing although they had no
right by law to be involved in politics. They faced the very real obstacles of
blatant official discrimination, lack of resources and outright fear on the
part of the electorate of the consequences of voting 'left'. The 1996-97 strike
has dispelled much of this fear and cut across the deeply ingrained regionalism
that has bedevilled Korean politics. The new situation could give quite
different results. But a great deal depends on programme and on being seen as
the best fighters and as those who have an answer for every problem confronted
by workers at home as well as at the workplace.
The programme of a workers' candidate should obviously take
up the demands for an 8-hour working day, a living wage and jobs for all. It
would link them to the need to take over the Chaebol and run industry and the
banks according to the wishes of the population expressed through elected representatives
at all levels. Elections in other countries show that candidates pledging to
live on a workers' wage and to have all their expenses controlled by
representatives of the movement are extremely popular. If they have led mass
struggles and scored major victories, they stand an even better chance of
getting a respectable vote. There is no point in standing candidates just for
the sake of getting some individuals into parliament but the elections and the
assembly debates themselves can provide a forum in which the voice of the
worker can be heard.
Independent unions
In the late 1980's and early 1990s, a period of turbulent
battles with the employers and with the state, the independent democratic trade
union movement established itself as a powerful force for change. 1988 saw the
formation of a 'National Headquarters for Labour Law Reform' and 1989 the 'National
Council of Regional and Industrial Trade Unions'. That year, it held a
nationwide May Day rally - the first one since 1945 when liberation from Japanese
rule was celebrated by the Korean working class in its own stylish manner.
After 1987, unionisation had proceeded rapidly in previously
unorganised sectors such as the press, hospitals, construction, research
institutes, schools, business associations, servicing and retailing. The newly
established unions in the giant factories of Daewoo, Hyundai, Kia etc.
increased their strength by coming together on a company level. Rejecting the
FKTU as a totally undemocratic and collaborationist federation, they formed
their own regional councils and then a 'National Council' which reorganised to
become the mainly blue-collar KTUC (Korean Trade Union Council). Encouraged by
the success of long-running strike battles at Hyundai, KBS and other
workplaces, it flexed its muscles by calling national action of all its
members.
In May of 1990, a federation of the (non-FKTU) white-collar
unions was established - the KCIIF. Technicians, clerical and financial
workers, college employees had set up their own independent federations.
Industrial Councils were set up by printing workers, foreign company workers, building
maintenance workers and university lecturers. A slightly earlier attempt in
1990 to set up a Solidarity Council of large enterprise trade unions had met
with vicious government repression. In 1991 anger erupted at the death in
prison of a trade union leader from Hanjin Heavy Industry and the killing by
riot police of a student activist with two months of strikes and protests in
May and June.
But one initiative stubbornly followed another to bring the
white-collar and blue-collar federations together to build an organisation to
rival the yellow FKTU. In 1992, a year of struggle against the wage system, the
KCIIF and the KTUC came together in a "Joint Committee for Ratification of
ILO Basic Conventions and Labour Law Reform". In all of the five years
that Roh Tae-woo had been in power, promise after promise on trade union,
democratic and human rights had been broken. Even the direct elections conceded
in the 1987 struggle failed to produce results which would change things
radically in favour of Korea's working people.
The hopes of many were pinned on the election to the
presidency in 1992 of one-time democracy movement leader Kim Young-sam. He even
took a number of 'left-wingers' from the student movement into his
administration. But, in spite of some popular moves against the most hated
enemies of the workers, he would soon dash their hopes of any real improvement
in their lives. Many of the old methods of holding them down would survive.
Under the new president, the army was, to some extent,
purged. The secret police had their wings clipped a little. A number of Chaebol
bosses were 'punished'. The founder of Hyundai, Chung Ju-young, was convicted
of illegal spending on his attempt to beat Kim Young-sam in the 1992 election. Later,
the founders of Samsung and Daewoo were amongst those put on trial and found
guilty of corrupt dealings with the two previous heads of state - Chun Doo-hwan
and Roe Tae-woo. The latter were also charged with treason for their part in
the Kwangju massacre and put behind bars.
But, in general, the old 'rules of the game' still applied.
A ruthless persecution of all opposition continued and hundreds of trade union
and political prisoners remained in jail. Most importantly for the hundreds of
thousands of workers joining the ranks of the emerging independent trade union federations,
the labour laws remained firmly geared to 'single-unionism' and to maintaining,
even intensifying, the unfettered rule of the Korean capitalist class.
Minju Nochong and Hankook Nochong
The mass strikes of that period - Korea Telecom, Seoul
Subway, Kumho Tyres - were still being met with mass reprisals. By late 1994,
agreement had been reached on the basis for forming a fully fledged alternative
labour federation - the KCTU or Minju Nochong. A year later, the KCTU
was up and running with an agreed structure, constitution, programme, aims and
principles (all accessible on its website). In 1995 it orchestrated a
nationwide struggle against a new wage curb policy "driven by government
and employers", as the KCTU puts it in 'Our History' (also on the 'web').
As a show of strength, a national workers' rally was organised by
representatives of over a thousand individual unions. On the day the KCTU
applied to the Ministry of Labour for "acquisition of legality" -
23rd November 1995 – its leader Kwon Yong-kil was arrested and kept in prison
until 13th March the following year.
With the economy already running into difficulties in 1995
and 1996, it was clear that the government, acting on behalf of the Chaebol and
hiding behind arguments about 'Segychten' (globalisation) and world
competition, would move onto the offensive in an attempt to take back the newly
won advances in wages and conditions. The familiar tune about workers putting
the economy at risk and 'pricing themselves out of the market' was not well
received. Even the FKTU or Hankook Nochong came under pressure from its
members to organise resistance but, as the KLSI puts it, "continued with
its Labour-management co-operative revisionism". It supported the ban on
'multi-unionism' which excluded the KCTU from any workplace where either the
FKTU or the company already had a union organisation and it did nothing to
fight the prohibition of unions in the public sector. (It had also secretly
signed wage accords with the employers in 1993 and 1994).
Nevertheless, the KCTU managed to build up a membership of
over half a million, organising in the 'newer' industries. It has a monopoly of
all of the six Korean car-making firms for example and all of ship- building.
The FKTU has traditionally organised in medium-sized firms. It claims well over
one million members, but its rivals say the real dues-paying membership is half
that. The average membership of unions affiliated to the KCTU is 3,746 while
the average for both federations is only 230. The rate of trade union
membership - whether as a proportion of the total workforce of 20 million or of
the 12 million employed workers - stands at no more than 14%. But this small
'active' can have a powerful effect; persecution creates formidable enemies.
End of Part Two
The first part of the pamphlet, covering pages 1 to 27, can be found here.
The final, third, part can be found here.
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