Violence Grows as S. Korean Labor Unrest Intensifies

More than 10,000 men in green combat fatigues mounted a recent pre-dawn raid on a shipyard in the southeastern port city of Ulsan, attacking the facility by land, air and sea.

The blitzkrieg ended within 40 minutes. As the shipyard filled with smoke, it was evident that the enemy had vanished.

It sounds like a scene from a Korean War film or maybe a drill from the “Team Spirit” exercises, which the U.S. military conducts with South Korean troops every spring. But this maneuver was for real--one of the latest episodes in South Korea’s increasingly bellicose labor relations.

The uniformed attackers were riot police, and they fired volleys of tear gas instead of rifles in the assault. Union men were the enemy, militant workers who had been engaged in a sit-in during a 109-day wildcat strike at Hyundai Heavy Industries, South Korea’s biggest shipbuilder.

Although fierce resistance had been expected, most of the strikers had sneaked out of the yard during the night. Police pursued them to their dormitories in a mopping-up operation, and Hyundai management quickly announced that the strike had been broken.

But nearly two weeks, scores of arrests and countless canisters of tear gas later, Hyundai has yet to achieve true labor peace. Although most of the workers have been showing up for work, a die-hard core of strikers continues to conduct rallies, shout anti-government slogans and throw rocks and firebombs at the police.

The protracted conflict is the centerpiece of a new season of labor unrest in South Korea. There were about 320 labor disputes in the first three months of 1989--44% more than in the same period last year--and they cost an estimated $2.4 billion in lost production and sales, according to the Economic Planning Board.

The Federation of Korean Trade Unions, which claims to represent 1.6 million workers, is advising member unions to demand an average increase of 26.8% in basic wages in spring wage negotiations. That would be on top of increases averaging more than 20% obtained last year. Union leaders insist that South Korean workers have been passed over by the country’s phenomenal industrial success and continue to work too long and too hard for too little pay.

If the federation is not satisfied with this year’s results, it plans to call an unprecedented general strike on April 20.

Called a Throwback

The troubles are not likely to seriously damage the economy, which continues to grow at a double-digit pace. But they add to political tension at a time the government of President Roh Tae Woo is sounding the alarm about the impending “social chaos” that supposedly threatens South Korea’s new “free democratic system.” Ironically, it was this system that gave birth to the labor movement two years ago after decades of authoritarian repression.

Labor activists say Hyundai’s reliance on the police to quell the worker unrest in Ulsan, coming just two weeks after 6,000 riot police crushed a subway strike in Seoul, is a throwback to the way managers handled labor relations until they were forced under recent democratic reforms to recognize employees’ rights to organize and bargain collectively.

“It’s immoral and illegal that public power is always used at the request of management, and never the workers,” said Lee Young Kap, an official at the trade union federation. “To be fair, the police should intervene on both sides.”

Behind the growing confrontational mood are legitimate management worries that a major wage push, coupled with the steady appreciation of the won currency, would hurt the international competitiveness of South Korean industrial exports.

But a stubborn attitude of hostility toward organized labor often overshadows the economic issues, said Park Young Ki, director of the Institute for Labor and Management at Seoul’s Sogang University.

“The managers in South Korea view unions as sources of conflict rather than as legal mechanisms by which disputes can be settled,” Park said. “In other words, management simply does not recognize the legitimacy of unions.”

Huge Increases Sought

Foreign companies operating in South Korea have not been unscathed by the confusion resulting from workers asserting their untested labor rights.

Foreign banks have been bedeviled by a surge in white-collar militancy, with unions asking for mind-boggling pay increases this year. In an extreme example, the union at Lloyds Bank is demanding an increase of 93%.

In the manufacturing sector, the rising cost of labor can undermine the purpose of running a plant in South Korea, where wages were once considered cheap. That apparently was the case when the American owners of Pico Korea Ltd., a maker of cable television components, decided at the end of February that it would be better to abandon their plant in Puchon, west of Seoul, than to try to reach an accommodation with the union and continue sustaining heavy operating losses.

Pico’s two American executives in Seoul fled the country after being held hostage during negotiations with the union, the company said. They left behind some $1.15 million in unsettled claims by 295 South Korean employees and by creditors. The Los Angeles-based parent, Pico Macom Inc., has been widely criticized, particularly in the U.S. business community in Seoul, for allegedly unethical behavior. Pico has refused to make severance payments as required by local law.

Violence has flared between union activists and workers opposed to collective bargaining in the most controversial labor dispute involving a foreign company. A small contingent of workers who organized a union at Motorola Korea Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. electronics giant Motorola Inc., say they have been routinely harassed and occasionally roughed up by a Motorola kusadae , or “save the company corps,” acting under the direction of management.

Used by Many Firms

Motorola officials deny that kusadae exist at the company, but they say the vast majority of employees oppose the union. They blame overenthusiastic loyal employees, acting spontaneously, for the violence and intimidation against the union. They also acknowledge that low-level managers were involved in confrontations in December and January in which several union members were injured.

Kusadae have been used in many large South Korean firms to block activities of the so-called democratic, or adversarial unions.

“The use of kusadae is a throwback to Chicago-type violence of the 1930s,” Herman Rebhan, general secretary of the International Metalworkers’ Federation, charged in a written statement. “Motorola in Korea is behaving as if Koreans were second-class inhabitants of the world and Korea was an economic colony for multinational companies.”

In one bizarre incident, four Motorola union activists were burned, two seriously, after soaking themselves in flammable thinner and attempting to push their way past anti-union workers to report to work. The union says a pro-management employee touched a lighter to the workers. The management implies that it was a case of self-immolation, a form of protest that is not uncommon in South Korea.

Early this month, for example, a 27-year-old union leader at a garment manufacturing plant in Songnam, south of Seoul, burned himself to death after wage negotiations broke down.

James Austgen, vice president and director of personnel in Asia for Motorola Inc., attributed the trouble at Motorola Korea to “peer pressure” that somehow got out of hand.

“How anyone can construe that to be a kusadae is some cynical, sinister plot,” Austgen said. “We don’t behave that way anywhere in the world.”

The company, which has a 60-year tradition of operating free of organized labor, recognized the tiny union, following the lead of IBM’s Korean unit, which had similar but less violent labor trouble. Last week, Motorola agreed to provide the union with office space at the plant. This was an important symbolic victory for the labor activists, who represent between 50 and 150 of Motorola Korea’s 3,800 employees.

Never before has an adversarial union existed at one of Motorola’s operations or represented any of the company’s 101,000 employees worldwide, Austgen said, adding, “We haven’t created any situation that would require people to be adversarial.”