hankyoreh

who had been sitting-in and injured amid the scuffle

Fifteen days after the inauguration of the administration of President Lee Myung-bak, government officials forcibly removed the members of an irregular employees’ union from the site of an ongoing sit-in demonstration in front of Koscom, the distributor of the Korea Exchange’s market data. Labor activists accused the Lee administration of “trying to resolve the issue of irregular workers with violence and suppression.”

At around 7:00 a.m. on March 11, officials from the Yeongdeungpo district in Seoul started removing tents and other items from the site, located in front of the Korea Exchange building in Yeouido-dong. There, scores of irregular Koscom workers have been staging a sit-in for the past 182 days. Some 60 irregular Koscom worked chained themselves to each other to prevent the officials from removing them from the site, but some 200 officials, and temporary workers hired to assist with the operation, pulled them out and took away 16 large tents and other items. Some 1,000 riot police assisted with the operation by blocking the site. In the course of the removal, six protesters were hospitalized after suffering major injuries, and one of the injured protesters, who is only identified by the surname Park, had his nose broken.

Hwang Yeong-su, the head of Koscom’s irregular workers’ union, said, “We had expressed our intention to voluntarily remove part of the demonstration facilities in meetings and official documents, but our proposals weren’t accepted. The district office has said for the past six months that it would remove the facilities. Their strong actions, taken just after the administration changed, translates into a warning to irregular workers,” Hwang said.

However, an official at the Yeongdeungpo district office said, “As the protesters illegally occupied a road and privately-owned lands, there were many complaints, so we couldn’t delay the removal any longer. It’s a forced legal removal. The timing of the removal wasn’t related to the change in the government,” the official said.

In a hastily arranged press conference earlier in the day, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions’ division of workers in the finance industry criticized the government for forcibly removing the facilities. “The Lee Myung-bak administration began to implement his ‘era of success’ initiative by barring irregular workers from Koscom from entering the inauguration ceremony, even though they had invitation cards,” the division said. “The destruction of the protest site shows the ambivalence of the Lee administration because it is not punishing the Koscom management, though it has been accused by the Labor Ministry of violating labor laws,” it said.

In a separate statement, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions also blamed the Lee administration, saying, “The government’s pledge to revitalize the economy for the benefit of low-income people is questionable, as it has now used force against irregular workers.”

The irrregular workers’ union at Koscom has been staging the sit-in since September last year, calling on the management to convert them to regular workers. A month later, the Labor Ministry ruled that Koscom violated labor laws by hiring irregular workers. In addition, the National Assembly committee for environment and labor sued Koscom Chief Executive Lee Jong-kyu for falsely testifying at the parliamentary audit session.

A new law on irregular workers went into effect on July 1. Though it was, as the government claimed, designed to protect irregular workers, it created controversy prior to its implementation. Under the law, companies are required to give irregular workers regular status after they have been employed for two years. Many companies, however, took this as an opportunity to fire many of their irregular employees, and labor-management disputes erupted around the nation.

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