100 New Unions Since July 1 : Labor Movement Puts S. Korea Democratic Reforms to the Test

It has been three months since Woo Ok Young’s boss told her she was like “a walking time bomb” on the assembly line of an electronics factory in Seoul’s Guro Industrial Complex.

“He told me, ‘You’re a troublemaker,’ ” Woo recalled recently. “He said, ‘We’re afraid you might start something here to form a labor union. This company cannot afford that. Why don’t you just quietly leave?’ ”

Woo, however, did not leave quietly. The 23-year-old worker had to be physically removed from the boss’s office by security guards that day, and she has been seething ever since.

Last Sunday, Woo and thousands of other recently dismissed workers laid the groundwork for revenge. They gathered at a church-funded industrial mission, and, chanting pro-labor and anti-government slogans, they formed the Dismissed Workers Assn. to fight for the reinstatement of fired workers.

The meeting was typical of the explosion of labor actions, strikes and sit-ins since President Chun Doo Hwan announced sweeping democratic reforms in virtually every sector of South Korea, a nation that has spent years under authoritarian, military-dominated rule.

Labor ministry officials said that since Chun’s July 1 announcement, more than 100 new labor unions have been formed, some of them in the nation’s 10 largest corporations, which long had been union-free.

Police have reported more than 75 illegal sit-ins, boycotts, strikes and other organized protests at taxi companies, garment factories, electronics assembly lines, coal mines, shipping firms and heavy industry plants.

And justice ministry officials have warned that if labor’s new assertiveness gets out of hand, triggering the kind of workplace unrest that erupted after the assassination of President Park Chun Hee in 1979, police will be forced to crack down on dissidents and order the arrest of people like Woo.

At stake is the future of one of the world’s most striking economic success stories. Over the past three decades, South Korea has transformed itself from a poverty-stricken, war-ravaged nation into a thriving power that now promises to enter the ranks of the world’s most advanced, industrialized economies.

Much of that development has occurred during the seven years of authoritarian rule under Chun, who suspended all collective bargaining and banned organized labor protests and the formation of independent labor unions when he seized power in 1980.

Now, said an economic planning ministry official who asked not to be identified, “we . . . expect labor unrest to cut into our growth.”

Others express doubts. “It is true there has been a tremendous surge of labor activity in the past few weeks, but the explosion is understandable when you consider the labor sector is the most suppressed of any in society today,” said one foreign missionary who has been pressing for workers’ rights in South Korea’s industrial plants for several years.

“There is still no guaranteed minimum-wage law. Anyone caught engaging in unauthorized union activity is arrested and tried. The workers can barely live on the wage they now earn, and the working conditions in the factories are very, very bad.”

The plea of the South Korean worker is hardly new. Hundreds of the political prisoners recently released in the government’s new amnesty program or still in jail as hard-core subversives were convicted on charges of labor activism, and the international rights group, Amnesty International, has long chided Chun’s government for abusing workers’ rights.

The United Nation’s International Labor Organization was equally critical of working conditions in South Korea in a report last year which said that the country has the highest incidence of industrial accidents in the world.

Last year alone, the report said, 1,718 workers were killed on the job and 141,809 others were disabled. And those figures represent slight increases over the previous year. Since 1980, accidents in the South Korean workplace have claimed more than 8,635 lives and injured nearly 1 million people.

What is new is the attitude of Chun’s Ministry of Labor and the country’s authorized labor alliance, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, an umbrella group representing the 2,365 company-organized unions that the government does permit.

“It is true that in the past, while we were pursuing this growth-oriented economic policy, there have been some areas left behind, particularly the area of unequal distribution of the fruits of profit and the poor working conditions that exist in the workplace,” said the labor ministry’s director of labor policy, Choi Seung Boo.

Choi added: “Whether we have had 66 sit-ins or 600 sit-ins since the president’s July 1 announcement, it does not matter. We may well have more actions like this because of heightened expectations.

“But these are understandable because they have been suppressed for so long. This is natural. But this does not interpret into chaos or an unstable society.”

Disputing the assessment of Chun’s economic officials, Choi insisted that the higher wages and increased worker rights that will come through the new labor activism will not cut into South Korean companies’ profits or threaten the nation’s progress.

“I think our economy is already at the stage where we have graduated from a labor-intensive economy,” he said. “What we will concentrate on is the inadequate distribution of profit, the improvement of working conditions and workers’ rights and the other areas that have been left behind, and I believe the profits are there to sustain growth during this period.”

Choi also pledged that his ministry will be more assertive in enforcing a new industrial safety act, which is designed to greatly reduce accidents at the workplace. And a new minimum wage law is due to take effect Jan. 1.

Even more profound, though, is the apparent change in attitude at the Federation of Korean Trade Unions.

The federation has long been viewed by many as a government-authorized alliance that worked harder to prevent unionization than to promote it. In a recent interview, though, Min Yo Ki, the federation’s general secretary, sounded almost as militant as the radicals who have been pressing for workers’ rights. He said, however, that he wants to maintain the federation’s ties to Chun’s ruling Democratic Justice Party because it is easier to change the system from within.

“Since the beginning of real industrialization in this country in the 1960s, there has been tremendously imbalanced development between the employer and the employee,” Min said. “The worker has been left behind.

“This new democracy is to balance that and make it equal, and our foremost goal is to fight the government and management to revise the labor-related laws and secure the workers’ three basic rights.”

Min also conceded that his federation’s new aggressive posture is an attempt to “absorb a lot of these so-called radicals and their supporters” into his moderate alliance. But he said the federation’s message is not new.

“We have been saying these same things all along,” Min said, “but without freedom of the press, no one has heard us.”

During the past seven years and during the similarly repressive regime of the late President Park Chung Hee, a powerful underground network of labor activism has grown up in Seoul’s heavily industrialized factory districts and in other cities with large blue-collar populations.

One of the most graphic examples of such activism is at the Urban Industrial Mission in Seoul’s blue-collar Yongdonpo neighborhood--the same Presbyterian Church-funded office where Woo and her co-workers formed their Dismissed Workers Assn.

For several years, former university students, church ministers and former factory workers have been teaching thrice-a-week “enlightenment classes” to workers enlisted through a discreet distribution of leaflets outside factories and plants.

During one typical evening class, a dozen workers who had already put in at least a 12-hour shift on assembly lines or in garment factories sat around a classroom and began by singing Korean protest songs.

“We’re making these beautiful clothes,” the group began singing to a solo guitar accompanist. “But who will wear these clothes?

“Will the wife of our president wear these clothes? Will it be the Japanese or Americans who wear these clothes? Who knows? “But we will wear this simple blue uniform forever.”

The song concluded, “When the president’s puppy catches cold, it goes to a hospital. But when we are sick and dying, we must simply endure.”

The formal class began with lessons on labor law, followed by discussions of the current political situation and specific problems encountered by each worker that day. Later, there was a showing of Marlon Brando’s pro-labor film, “On the Waterfront,” subtitled in Korean.

Woo and four other employees who also were recently dismissed from the same electronics assembly company gave a more personal account of what workers’ rights groups call “suppression of labor” under Chun.

Problems at the factory, where about 600 assembly-line workers produce thousands of satellite antenna dishes for sale in the United States, began on March 20, the workers said, when a young girl, suspected of covert labor organizing, was fired on the spot.

The other employees were so angered by the firing that they stopped working for 20 minutes. Stunned by so militant an act, the factory foremen summoned the president of the firm, who personally visited the factory floor and heard the workers’ complaints.

Wages, which average about $5 for a 13-hour work day, were too low, they told the president. Dust in the packing rooms was making them cough. They requested higher wages and fans, along with permission to appoint a worker representative to negotiate improvements with management. And the president promised to look into it.

Ten days later, Woo, who was among the assembly-line workers who presented their case to the president, was summoned to his office. There, she was confronted with her employment record that showed she had been dismissed from other companies on suspicion of labor activism. It was also suggested that she had left the university after just two years to work in factories, making her a suspect of what the government calls “disguised infiltration”--deliberately lowering one’s social status to work to radicalize the labor force.

Nearly a month after she was fired, two other assembly-line workers were dismissed simply for inquiring about what had happened to Woo, the workers said.

Now, these employees have been instrumental in forming the new association, and they said that they plan to use the atmosphere created by Chun’s reforms to fight--not only for their own jobs but for those of the more than 1,000 other workers that the labor ministry confirms have been fired since 1980 on suspicion of labor activism. The workers do not trust the government to carry through with its promises on labor reform and say that, in any case, they must struggle to be reinstated.

But their fight still will not be totally in the open, they added.

“Far from it,” Woo said last weekend. “Workers still must live under extreme terror. One wrong move and they are dismissed. There is still a chance that, if we organize ourselves and present a strong front, we may get token concessions from management. But, overall, the atmosphere remains the same.”

Labor Ministry Director Choi is among those who disagreed.

“The atmosphere has definitely changed,” he said, referring to his ministry’s efforts to work as advisers to ruling party members drafting a new national constitution that he said will include the three basic workers’ rights: the right to collective bargaining, to collective labor action and to organize independent unions.

“There isn’t any ‘if,’ ” Choi said. “These are positive steps we are taking. In every society, there are people that remain skeptical, but this is not the opinion of the masses.”

Choi conceded that the radical labor factions remain “a formidable force,” but he added that, “through dialogue, and through the actual implementation of workers’ rights, they will be absorbed.”

Trade union federation general secretary Min agreed, but warned:

“So far, it looks fairly positive that all of these reforms will be implemented,’ he said. “But there’s no telling what will happen if they are not.”