hankyoreh

The day of the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics, August 8, is also the 1,081st day of a difficult fight by irregular female workers at Kirung Electronics. They are resisting their wrongful dismissal and demanding “direct” employment. It is also the 59th day of a sit-in protest against the company’s reneging on a last-minute agreement that had been arrived at with company management.

There should be no need to describe what the situation is for these laborers, since for two months they have been camping out atop the guardhouse at the front gate of the company’s plant, sometimes facing violent heat and sometimes facing violent rains. Medical personnel who have met with them say they have arrived at their “medical limits.”

At negotiations held June 7 that took place with much difficulty, the president of the company proposed hiring people as regular employees “after a year of training,” and workers accepted the plan. The very next day, however, mid-level managers came out in opposition to the deal and it collapsed. It was absurd. If the agreement had been abided by, female laborers of Kirung Electronics would never have gone on a hunger strike that is putting their lives at risk.

The company’s position is that it cannot give them regular employment because it is going to stop plant operations in Korea and start up one in China. The ruling Grand National Party even came up with an arbitration plan on July 23, but it was something utterly unacceptable to the protesting workers, who have been on strike for three years demanding direct employment. The GNP suggestion is that the company guarantee only that they be hired as irregular workers by a new outsourcing company, whose legitimacy has been in question, with a final decision made on whether they are given regular status after a year and a half.

With things as they are, this hunger strike by female employees is going to continue. If so, their lives will be at risk. Legislators, members of the Lee Myung-bak administration, and civil society need to take a special interest in the situation and rise to resolve it. Management and laborers need to take a step back and make a concentrated effort to produce an amicable agreement.

The issue of giving full-time, regular employment to the workers laid off by Kiryung Electronics is a question that urgently requires serious dialogue about whether hiring them that way would really be impossible, whether there are alternatives that would give them the same job quality and security if they cannot be fully hired, and how to relieve the mutual resentment between labor and management that has accumulated over the past three years. There is not much time. Our society becomes a barbarous one if we ignore these workers putting their lives on the line in a hunger strike. Now is the time for all of us to pool our strengths together to allow them to return to the company smiling.


Editor’s note: The Kiryung workers’ demand for “direct” employment is based on a desire for change in the system many companies use to employ irregular workers. The system is “indirect” when workers are hired by an outsourcing company for employment at a second company, which takes no responsibility for the worker or their rights.

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