hankyoreh

Government authorities and their hired help removed members of the irregular employees’ union at Koscom from a sit-in encampment that was part of a strike at the company, which has gone on for a considerable amount of time. With police support, civil servants from Seoul’s Yeongdeungpo neighborhood government office, and hired temporaries, removed the protesting unionists in what was described as “a rampage of violence and verbal abuse that made you think the clock had been turned back decades.” The Yeongdeungpo government says the event was “nothing more than the forceful removal of illegal structures violating road laws.” It was just an administrative procedure, and yet for that they needed around 150 hired hands and 1,000 riot police waiting at the ready at the break of dawn?

The sit-in at Koscom by union members was not something that just started yesterday. Approximately 90 irregular workers have been demanding to be made full-time employees for some 182 days. It is indeed a fact that neighborhood residents had filed formal complaints, and it is for that reason the union had announced its intention to remove part of the sit-in site. The neighborhood government never said anything in response, so you wonder why it waited around six months, only to carry out the law all of a sudden. When asked who came up with that kind of a decision, the neighborhood government explained only that it “was carrying out the law” and that government office employees had made the decision. More than a few things about what transpired remain hard to understand, including just why they think you could believe working-level government functionaries could decide to have that kind of “joint operation” between them and the private sector, and on such a scale.

The way this has played out is no small matter. It is the first time government strength has been deployed to a labor dispute since the inauguration of President Lee Myung-bak 15 days ago, and it will obviously send a cold chill over labor-government relations for some time to come. What is most troubling of all is that the line about “maintaining law and principle in labor-business relations” appears to be not entirely disconnected from the direction of the new president’s labor policy.

Let’s make this clear: the law is not supposed to be the easy trump card for labor-management relations. Dialogue and compromise come before the law. The place to start would be to first ask why it is union members have been engaged in a sit-in for so long, and to engage them in dialogue. When you approach labor issues with forced removals, without making any such effort, all you do is make labor-management issues more difficult to resolve.

Furthermore, if you are going to talk about the law, then the law needs to be applied in a fair manner, to labor and business both. The company in question used illegal hiring practices on several occasions, so who can accept it when the law is invoked only when it applies to laborers? The law is one tool for resolving disputes between workers and companies, but it should be applied with prudence. What is important here is resolving the issue of irregular employment and producing a balanced labor policy.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]