Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 08:24:20 +0100 (MET)
From: malecki-AT-algonet.se (Robert Malecki)
Subject: M-I: Korea


Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 16, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

KOREAN LABOR: A LONG TRADITION OF MILITANT STRUGGLE

By Hillel Cohen

The strike wave that has hit south Korea continues a long
tradition of militant struggles by Korean workers.

For decades prior to World War II, a militant national
labor movement fought for workers' rights during the
colonial occupation of Korea by Japanese imperialism.

During the war, the vanguard of the workers' movement
participated with the communist-led guerrilla struggle that
fought the Japanese occupation army.

After liberation in August 1945, these forces became the
core of the new workers' state that consolidated in the
north. But the U.S. army occupied Korea south of the 38th
parallel and established a U.S. military administration with
the cooperation of former collaborators with the Japanese
colonial government.

U.S. OCCUPIERS ATTACKED LABOR GROUPS

For five years, the U.S. army administration carried out
attacks on all organizations and sympathizers of the labor
movement, socialists and supporters of an independent Korea.
Tens of thousands were killed, and many more were jailed or
beaten.

When the Korean war broke out on June 25, 1950, it was a
war of the peoples' army defending the socialist north from
the U.S. army and its neocolonial, capitalist administration
in the south.

Although the war ended in a cease-fire in 1953, the Korean
nation has remained divided, with about 40,000 U.S. troops
still occupying the south. While the north pursued a path of
socialist construction, in the south the U.S. military
administration gave rise to a series of military
dictatorships that promoted a state-capitalist, neocolonial
economy.

Heavy investment from the U.S. and Japan, coupled with
severe repression of labor rights contributed to the growth
of the choebols--the huge Korean conglomerates like Hyundai,
DaeWoo and Samsung. Bribes from the big corporations flowed
freely to the military governments, and government subsidies
for industry flowed back.

Statistics in 1994 showed that workers in Korea had longer
working hours than any other workers in Asia. The enormous
profits from this intense exploitation were the basis for a
prolonged period of capitalist expansion.

In 1987, a huge strike wave of workers and students shook
the U.S.-backed military government of Roh Tae Woo. The
workers were demanding higher wages and democratic rights.
At the same time, the corporations had outgrown their need
for state capitalist methods and were chafing at the
excessive cost of bribes and support of the expensive tastes
of the military-bureaucracy.

One of the bourgeois opposition leaders, Kim Young Sam,
was coopted into the government and in 1992 prepared for the
first civilian government since a popular government
appeared for a brief period following student uprisings in
the early 1960s. With the new government in 1993, the
National Security Law was amended to remove the labor
movement from the jurisdiction of the Korean CIA.

Until then, this hated, brutal arm of the state could
investigate, harass and jail union leaders along with others
in the opposition. Almost all labor leaders have been in
jail for at least one or two years for union work, including
the chairman of the Korean Federation of Labor or
Minjunohchung, Kwan Young Kil.

`THE NOTORIOUS LABOR LAW'

>From the first days of the U.S. military occupation of the
south of Korea, through the war and right up until today,
there has not been a legal, national labor organization in
the south. A variety of anti-union regulations under what
Korean unionists call "the notorious labor law" have been
used against the labor movement.

Under these laws any support of a strike by non-strikers
is considered illegal third-party intervention. They also
make illegal membership in the independent unions that are
part of Minjunohchung and that are leading the current
general strike.

Only the government-dominated Hanguknoh chung (Federation
of Korean Labor Unions) unions are legally recognized. The
strength of the strike movement and the widespread
opposition to the government's labor policy has forced
Hanguknoh chung to support the strikes so far.

Since 1993, the independent unions have been able to
function a little more openly, with offices and literature.
Kim Young Sam had promised in his campaign to repeal the
repressive labor laws. This never happened, and the
independent unions are still banned from legally
representing the workers.

Despite the legal ban, the unions have successfully
carried out strikes--that are almost always declared illegal
by the government--and negotiated wage increases.

In addition the workers had some legal protection from
layoffs. The corporations would find ways around the law,
with false charges of misconduct or by bribing officials.
Nonetheless the law offered some protections.

ECONOMIC CRISIS IN SOUTH KOREA

But the long period of capitalist expansion in the south
started winding down last year, and it seems that a classic
crisis of overproduction, as described by Karl Marx, has
begun unfolding.

To resolve the crisis, the Korean corporate giants are
looking to do more investment abroad and to "restructure"
the south Korean work force with layoffs and conversion to a
provisional, temporary or "contingent" work force. To do so
meant repealing the law that prohibited layoffs.

Along with this strategy, south Korea applied for
membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development. But as a result of pressure from the
International Labor Organization and some social-democratic
representatives in the OECD, reform of the labor laws was
made a condition of joining.

At the same time, with the prospect that a decline in the
economy along with layoffs would lead to more labor unrest,
the Kim Young Sam government tried to pass new legislation
that would allegedly legalize the unions but only after
three years and with all sorts of restrictive conditions.

These laws would restore the power of the successor to the
KCIA to investigate and prosecute labor activists and would
allow corporations to legally lay off at will and hire
replacement workers as temporaries and provisionals.

The struggle to block this new anti-labor legislation and
to immediately legalize the unions is at the heart of the
current strike struggle.

U.S. policy toward north Korea, like U.S. policy on Cuba,
has combined economic embargo with military threats and
promises of economic aid if the socialist state was
dismantled. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S.
government officials have been predicting the fall of the
socialist government in the north.

It is undoubtedly unwelcome news to the U.S. government
and Wall Street that mass rebellions are taking place in the
south, not the north, and that it is the south government
that is in crisis. But this is welcome news to all class-
conscious workers who are in complete solidarity with the
struggle of the Korean workers.

Trade unionists and others who would like to send messages
of solidarity to the union can address them to Chairman Kwon
Young Kil, Minjunoh chung and send them via fax care of 301-
989-0037 and they will be forwarded.

                         - END -

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint
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Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
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