S. Korea’s Ruling Party Calls on Government to Avert Bus Strike

This country’s ruling party called Wednesday for government mediation to prevent chaos in Seoul in the face of a threat by bus drivers to go on strike this weekend in the South Korean capital.

If the government does intervene, it will be the second time in a matter of days that it has stepped into a labor dispute. On Tuesday, the Labor Ministry recommended a three-point plan that ended two days of sometimes violent demonstrations by locked-out employees of Hyundai, the country’s leading industrial conglomerate.

Necessary Exception

Lee Min Sup, a spokesman for the ruling Democratic Justice Party, defended its proposal on the threatened bus strike as a necessary exception to President Chun Doo Hwan’s declared principles for settling labor disputes.

“We (and President Chun) have recommended the independent settlement of disputes between labor and management,” Lee said, “but it is important for the government to intervene at an appropriate moment when independent settlements are impossible.”

Negotiations in the bus dispute have failed to narrow the gap between the drivers’ demand for a 28% wage increase and the 5% increase reportedly offered by the management of Seoul’s privately owned bus companies.

In the Hyundai case, the Labor Ministry intervened with its three-point plan after lockouts drove the workers into a series of protests. Labor leaders had scheduled a march on the city hall at Ulsan, the site of Hyundai’s major factories, for Wednesday morning if there had been no breakthrough.

The wave of strikes and sit-ins sweeping South Korea has put Chun’s government on the spot. To crack down on labor would risk a dangerous display of popular feelings--”the will of the people,” ruling party chief Roh Tae Woo calls them--that led Chun to endorse proposals for democratic reform seven weeks ago. But letting the walkouts continue would also pose a threat of public disorder and, in time, damage the country’s export-led economy.

Government leaders instead have called for peaceful settlements and publicly recognized that blue-collar workers deserve a greater share in the country’s economic growth.

Broad-Based Unions

The government also seemed to be listening to the will of the people when it reversed its position and endorsed new, broad-based labor unions in the Hyundai dispute.

“The new team has greater power (than the pro-company unions that had been formed earlier),” Yoo Chul Jin, senior vice president of Hyundai Heavy Industries, told reporters at an Ulsan press conference Wednesday after Tuesday’s march there. “It’s supported by more workers. You saw it.”

According to Yoo, the Labor Ministry has agreed to try to persuade Hyundai’s pro-company unions to disband. If they do not, he said, Hyundai management will be in a difficult negotiating position because these older unions are legally registered as the official labor representatives at Hyundai plants. Labor Ministry pressure on the older unions would be another example of government intervention.

Before the government moved to intervene, President Chun cited independent settlements and a hands-off government attitude as the heart of government policy in resolving the wave of labor disputes. Chun, in outlining his guidelines at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, insisted that settlements be reached peaceably and that “impure elements” be prevented from exploiting disputes.

The importance of Hyundai, as both a producer and an example, may have forced his hand. With management and the new unions prepared to resume wage negotiations on a company-by-company basis, Lee Choon Lim, president of Hyundai Heavy Industries, said in Ulsan that the lockout at the seven Hyundai subsidiaries involved will be lifted this morning.

“Work will resume when all our employees come back to the yard,” he said.

Yoo, the senior vice president, said that once the dispute over representation is settled, company officials will discuss with the new unions whether workers should be paid for the two days they were locked out.

“Perhaps something around 60%,” he suggested.

He also said that the Labor Ministry discussed with officials of all the Hyundai subsidiaries its proposals for settling the conflict. There was no opposition, he said.