hankyoreh

People lay wreaths at a memorial for a 19-year-old irregular worker who died repairing a sliding door at Guui Subway Station in Seoul

During my tour of shipyards around South Korea over the past few days, I met a plumber who is working for a subcontractor of Samsung Heavy Industries on Geoje Island in South Gyeongsang Province.

The plumber told me a story about a young man who had been his coworker. The young man was moving a machine used to smash steel plates when the machine bit into his thigh and severed an artery. As blood gushed from the wound, the man was driven off in one of the subcontractor’s vehicles and died two days later.

The man’s coworkers were upset that his life had been lost because the subcontractor was trying to cover up the accident. They pointed out that he could have received potentially life-saving emergency care if the subcontractor had called Samsung Heavy Industries’ 3119 ambulance.

This year alone, five people have lost their lives the factory where he worked - and all of them were subcontractor workers.

The 19-year-old young man who died on May 28 while repairing a sliding door at Guui Subway Station, as well as the young men who died at Seongsu Station in Jan. 2013 and at Gangnam Station in Aug. 2015, were all working for subcontractors.

On June 1, four subcontractor workers at POSCO E&C died when an explosion caused a collapse during construction work on the subway in Namyangju.

An echo of a line from a labor anthem that was sung by members of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions 25 years ago - “from the shipyards of Okpo to the railroads of Seoul” - can be heard in 2016 in the screams of subcontractor workers.

Through a freedom of information request to Seoul Metro, I acquired statistics that categorized their workers by their employment status. As of the end of this April, the company had 4,253 workers employed by subcontractors.

These subcontractors are not only involved in repairing sliding doors. Train car repairs and car operation in the yard are also subcontracted out. In Daejeon and Gwangju, even the attendants inside the subway station have been outsourced.

Korail auctioned off maintenance and repair work of the train tracks to Korail Tech, one of its subsidiaries. As of last August, Korail Tech had 44 permanent employees with 911 people at subcontractors, meaning that more than 95% of its staff is outsourced. During the past five years, not a single subcontractor worker has become a regular worker.

The five workers who were crushed by a train while repairing the tracks at Gyeyang Station on the Incheon Airport Railroad in Dec. 2011 were all subcontractor workers for Korail Tech.

The trend of outsourcing work that began at shipyards during the Asian financial crisis in 1997 has become an epidemic raging across the country. Life and work have been supplanted by efficiency and cost-cutting. The epidemic has even engulfed the public domain, and South Koreans have been cut down in the flower of their youth.

The media is reporting that the police believe the primary blame for the accident at Guui Station lies with the station attendant who was not watching the screen showing security camera footage of the platform. The police are reportedly considering whether to charge this station attendant with involuntary manslaughter.

The police say that the attendant who failed to notice what was happening on one of more than fifty screens is the criminal responsible for this disaster. They are not blaming the city of Seoul, which sold off its responsibility for the lives and safety of its citizens to subcontractors. They are not blaming the South Korean government for scuttling efforts to manage projects directly by stating that not even a single additional employee could be added to the public company’s rolls.

The outsourcing epidemic has brought disaster not only to the 19-year-old worker but also to the attendants on the train involved in the accident and to the attendants at the station where the accident occurred.

Perhaps we are also accomplices in the tragedy at Guui Station. If we had not averted our eyes from the accidents at Seongsu Station and Gangnam Station, if we had not held our tongues when subcontractor worker for Hyundai Heavy Industries fell into the ocean and drowned on the job and when a temp worker for a subcontractor of Samsung Electronics was blinded by methanol, perhaps things would be different.

In the OECD’s 2016 Better Life Index, released on June 5, South Korea ranked 28th out of 38 countries. And South Korea was at the bottom in the percentage of people who work 50 or more hours a week, in work-life balance, in overall health and in the sense of belonging to a community. This is where South Korean society is today, and we have been brought here by our silence.

There is a flood of visitors to the site of the accident at Guui Station. Messages that had been trapped online were expressed on post-it notes and attached to the glass at the section of the platform where the accident occurred. Indignation that was concealed on social media is evolving into a march on Guui Station.

Subcontractor workers at South Korea’s shipyards who had resigned themselves to their situation as if it were their fate are starting to look into labor unions.

Could this be the beginning of a movement to stop this epidemic of outsourcing death in the Republic of Subcontractors?

By Park Jeom-kyu, member of Building a World Without Irregular Work

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