South Korea Averts a Nationwide Strike

The government of South Korea appeared to win a significant victory Tuesday in its labor reform efforts when one of the country’s largest and traditionally most aggressive labor groups called off a threatened nationwide strike.

The move is expected to cripple, at least in the short term, the momentum of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, which represents about 600,000 workers. Aggressive strikes and walkouts have been considered among the chief obstacles to reforms ordered by the International Monetary Fund as a condition of its nearly $60-billion bailout of South Korea in 1997.

The labor group had been gearing up for what it had expected to be the biggest-ever such walkouts this week, culminating in a huge demonstration on Saturday, May Day. But it now appears that the day will be relatively quiet.

A decision by Seoul subway workers to return to work Tuesday, ending an eight-day walkout under threat of dismissal, took the wind out of the confederation’s mobilization efforts.

Several other unions in the confederation--including metalworkers and telecommunications and public-sector employees--canceled or limited planned walkouts when a lack of public support became clear.

Many experts expect leaders of the confederation, the second-largest such association in South Korea, to resign because of the humiliating setback.

“Of the confederation’s many strikes, this is the first to fail,” said Kim Hwang Joe, professor of labor and management at Yonsei University.

In response to the government’s victory, the South Korean stock market rose Tuesday to its highest level in 2 1/2 years. Volatile labor relations have been a sizable deterrent to foreign direct investment here.

“It’s a happy morning that the subway strike is over,” President Kim Dae Jung’s office said in a statement. “The labor situation is life or death to us. . . . Now it’s time to build a new relationship and lead our society into a more mature democracy.”

By Tuesday morning, a dejected Hwang Young Sook, 36, was among the few subway union members left in the makeshift tents at strike headquarters at Myongdong Cathedral in central Seoul. Hundreds of subway workers had spent the previous week camping out in a festival-like atmosphere.

Hwang wasn’t optimistic about his chances of returning to the job he has held for a decade, since subway management said it planned to fire many of the union activists.

“It was a lonely and tiring fight against such powerful authorities,” he said. “When we started, I didn’t think anything about failure. I was so sure we would win like in the past.”

The labor group appeared to have made a key miscalculation by assuming it would receive wide public support. In the years before the country’s sharp economic downturn, an era of seemingly endless economic growth, such support was a given.

But 8.6% of the South Korean work force is now unemployed, and many people consider those with any job to be fortunate. It did not go down well when the subway workers in effect asked for a pay raise by seeking to reduce their hours from 44 to 40 per week without a pay cut.

The workers contend that their views were misrepresented to the public--that their base salaries were barely enough to scrape by on, and that they wanted to help provide jobs for the unemployed.

Armed riot police stood four deep on many Seoul streets for the past several days, blocking the entrance to Kim Ing Kwan’s shoe store.

“This is not good for sales, and it doesn’t look good to foreigners,” he said. “The subway workers should all get sacked: The subway union is too big, it’s not efficient at all, and it needs reform.”

But many labor analysts agreed with union complaints that the government and the business conglomerates known as chaebol have been too autocratic in their reform plans. These analysts sympathized with workers’ complaints that they should be involved in the decision-making.