Korea Boom Is a Bust for Much of the Work Force

From a war-wrecked agricultural pauper, South Korea has emerged as the “next Japan.” Its cities gleam with steel plants, automated factories and skyscrapers. But this hard-working nation of 42 million may falter in Japan’s footsteps because of a problem its Asian neighbor lacks--a restive work force.

Church groups, opposition politicians and students are mounting a labor-rights movement that could undermine Korea’s “economic miracle.” They complain of long hours, few days off, low wages, unpaid overtime, unsafe working situations and government repression of labor activists.

South Korea’s economic growth rate has averaged a remarkable 8.4% annually since 1962. Exports of consumer electronics, textiles, shoes, cars and microchips in 1985 were worth about $30 billion, making South Korea the world’s 12th-largest trading nation. South Korean video-cassette recorders, television sets, automobiles and steel have forced many Japanese companies to abandon the cheap end of production on world markets.

“The Korean workers preparedness to work long hours is the reason for their success,” said a British diplomat. “You can’t get people in our country to do that.”

Social scientists say this work ethic is rooted in 2,000 years of Confucian autocracy and attitudes that still regulate much of the daily pattern of life--devotion to elders, respect for order and obedience for authority without complaint.

“The four textile factories that I’ve been dealing with have no windows, holes in the walls, virtually no protection from chemicals that the workers breathe and a boss who pushes them from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m.,” said an American buyer of Korean products in Seoul. “Yet, most don’t seem to complain.”

Such conditions helped produce the Korean boom, which was fueled by low-cost manufacturing facilities and a highly disciplined, productive work force.

“The government believes that the only way to keep a competitive edge in the world market is to exploit the work force and maintain low wages,” said Lee Gil Jae, general secretary of the Korean Christian Action Organization, a Catholic and Protestant group that works to improve living standards of laborers, peasants and slum dwellers.

In the past two years, labor unrest has sharply increased. In April, 1985, thousands of auto workers seized the Daewoo Motors plant (whose cars will be available in the United States in early 1987 as Pontiac LeMans models through General Motors dealerships). This was the first big organized protest in heavy manufacturing since President Chun Doo Hwan seized power in a 1980 military coup.

Two months after the Daewoo demonstration, thousands of women workers picketed alongside students at the Kuro textile factory in Seoul. “At that time, the Kuro rally was the largest joint protest of students and laborers in the history of the labor movement,” said Lee Shin Bom, a former labor activist who spent six years in Korean prisons and is now director of the Asia Commission for the Washington-based International Center for Development Policy.

The Daewoo and Kuro incidents were among 265 labor disputes reported in 1985, up from 113 incidents in 1984, according to the U.S. State Department.

Workers were even more militant in 1986. Last May thousands of industrial workers protested working conditions in the western port city of Inchon, culminating in a confrontation with riot police wielding clubs and iron bars. Reporters described the scene as the most serious civil disturbance since the bloody 1980 Kwangju revolt, in which protesters seized the city government.

Unsanctioned unions are proliferating as an alternative to the government-controlled Federation of Korean Trade Unions and its 16 affiliates. In the first six months of 1986, these underground unions helped organize more than 40 illegal strikes by such diverse groups as bus and taxi drivers and textile and electronic workers. Many strike leaders were arrested and are still in jail. The emergence of such unions was spurred by labor-code revisions, enacted soon after Chun assumed power, that made strikes and union independence seem more difficult than everbut more necessary than before.

These new labor syndicates rely on militant church groups and students. The Korean Christian Workers Federation, for example, is organizing a nationwide system of underground unions to put students in factory jobs so they can organize on the front lines. According to the Far Eastern Economic Review, some 1,500 students are believed to be active in the underground labor movement.

University students, however, are legally barred from factory work. According to the Labor Ministry, 350 students were fired from various plants during the first five months of 1986 for “concealing their college background.” The ministry recently warned that force would be used to close down 14 of the underground unions if they did not “voluntarily disband.”

Companies try to weed out vocal workers by dismissing or separating them, or by hiring thugs known as “soccer teams” to beat them up. According to one Western diplomat, the Kuro management broke up the 1985 worker-student rally by sending in “Love the Company Squads” to intimidate the protesters.

Employers also turn to local police, who, opposition leaders say, may beat workers and even kidnap or torture them. “All the leaders of the Seoul Workers’ Federation (an underground union) were kidnaped and badly tortured by the anti-communist section that usually handles cases involving North Korean spies,” said Lee Gil Jae.

Some workers have turned to the most desperate of protests--suicide. In the past two years, six workers have publicly taken their own lives, three by drenching their bodies with gasoline and setting themselves on fire. Some may have followed the example of Chun Tae Il, a 21-year-old Seoul textile worker, whose self-immolation while holding a copy of the nation’s labor code spurred the government of Gen. Park Chung Hee to allow the organization of a union at his plant in 1970.

Opposition groups say that such extreme actions are a result of an inequitable economic system in which an estimated 70% of the economy is held by six companies. The National Council of Churches in Korea compiled these statistics:

--Industrial fatalities in manufacturing are 31 times that of Japan. (According to the Labor Ministry, 141,809 workers were killed or injured in 1985--19,824 were partially or totally disabled and 1,718 lost their lives.)

--The average worker puts in 54.4 hours per week (Taiwan and Singapore workers, by comparison, work 48.1 hours per week).

--More than two-thirds of the total work force earn about $120 a month.

--Industrial wages average only 43% of the cost of subsistence living (10% of the work force earns less than $110 a month, considered minimum survival level, according to a study by the Christian Institute for the Study of Justice and Social Development).

--Few companies pay workers for overtime or holidays.

--Women, who dominate the textile and electronic industries, work for less than half the wages of men. Married women are routinely refused jobs.

--Computerized blacklists--a joint effort by the Ministry of Labor, employers and the Korean Central Intelligence Agency--are distributed to most factories to keep out labor activists. The lists currently include about 1,400 names; once blacklisted, industrial workers are seldom re-employed.

Government economists insist that these statistics are biased and exaggerated, and that their figures show the average income in manufacturing to be about $260 a month. The government hopes to reduce protest by enacting a minimum-wage and social-security law, and by setting higher safety standards. But some officials acknowledge that working conditions are poor in many factories.

“There are bad employers who exploit their workers,” said Hyun-Joon Chang, a U.S.-trained economist who works for the government-financed Korea Development Institute. “But there are others who do their best by offering dormitories, meal tickets and transportation subsidies.”

But workers also complain about such “benefits.” Dormitories are Spartan; meal tickets and medical insurance are deducted from salaries. Some factories that pick up employees in company-owned buses don’t provide the same service for employees working late at night.

At least one Korean corporate giant has opted to avoid domestic turmoil by relocating a portion of its operation to the United States. Hyundai, South Korea’s largest conglomerate, moved part of its electronics manufacturing to California’s Silicon Valley.

But Hyundai, in escaping some Korean labor problems, may have brought others with it. A $400,000 damage suit was filed last September in U.S. District court in San Jose against the company’s Santa Clara plant. John Pemberton, an attorney for the San Francisco office of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said the plaintiffs charged that eight non-Korean engineers were dismissed because of their nationality; Korean employees were forced to work Saturdays without pay, and a female engineer was denied valuable training and told that “she should stay home with her children.”

The increasing participation of trade unionists in demonstrations at home is tarnishing the Chun regime’s image abroad, adding to the government’s other problems in the area of human rights. In Korea itself the labor discord imperils Chun’s most impressive achievement in power--hard-fought economic success.