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The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education notified the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU, Jeon Gyo Jo) and other teachers’ unions that it has fully scrapped collective bargaining agreement it signed with the unions in 2004. Tensions began to flare when the union voiced its opposition to the move, calling it an “an attempt to incapacitate unions.”

On November 5, the SMOE said that it “had asked the unions to revise the 2004 collective bargaining agreement several times because it’s been said that it undermines a school’s independence and educational competitiveness, but they didn’t respond. On October 20, we requested that the unions revise 21 of the provisions in the agreement, but there was no clear response so we decided to nullify the agreement completely.”

Kim Gyeong-hoi, the SMOE vice superintendent, said, “If the 2004 agreement continues, it will be difficult for schools to assign teachers during vacation and push for education policies such as the evaluation of scholastic achievement.” Kim said the decision to negotiate a new agreement was “unavoidable” because previous accords included terms for private schools that go beyond the jurisdiction of the SMOE superintendent.

The nullification of the 2004 collective bargaining agreement will go into effect beginning June 1, 2009, or six months after the SMOE notified the unions, under the law governing labor unions.

In response, Song Won-jae, the chief of the Seoul section of Jeon Gyo Jo, said, “The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union, the Korean Union of Teachers and Education Workers (Han Gyo Jo) and the Korean Liberal Teachers’ Union (Jayu Gyojo) have had difficulty reaching a collective bargaining agreement due to a disagreement about the number of negotiators. To resolve the issue, we asked several times to meet with the SMOE, but our request for dialogue was rejected.” Jeon Gyo Jo “will prove the unfairness of the unilateral abolishment of collective bargaining agreements, even with a lawsuit,” Song said.

Jeon Gyo Jo has some 12,000 members, while Han Gyo Jo and Jayu Gyojo have some 400 and 500 members each. Jeon Gyo Jo had proposed that the number of negotiators chosen to represent the three unions be proportional to the number of members in each one, but Jayu Gyojo wanted the number to be the same for each union.

In particular, Jeon Gyo Jo is concerned that education authorities in other regions could also nullify their collective bargaining agreements. After the SMOE’s October 20 announcement, educational authorities in North Chungcheong Province on October 27 requested that a similar deal made with the provincial section of Jeon Gyo Jo be renegotiated.

In a parliamentary session held on November 5, Education, Science and Technology Minister Ahn Byung-man said, “Metropolitan and provincial education offices have changed various accords made with the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union. Unions can’t intervene in education policy, so policy accords need to be corrected.”

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