hankyoreh

Kim Gyeong-bong spends his 4

The cherry blossom festivals that symbolize spring in Korea are just around the corner, but Apr. 3 was one of those days when it feels cold whenever the sun is obscured hidden by clouds. That afternoon, an older man, wearing a lightweight black padded jacket and a white hat, emerged on the roof of a three-story building in Seoul’s Deungchon neighborhood and looked down on dozens of people who had gathered in front of the building. Over the jacket, the man was wearing a vest bearing the message, “13 years since the layoffs – we need a solution, Park Young-ho!”

The man on the roof, named Kim Gyeong-bong, was born on Apr. 3, 1959, which made this his 60th birthday. Kim is better known as one of the workers laid off from Cort Guitars (also known as Cor-Tek), the company that is the focus of the longest-running labor struggle in South Korea’s history.

If Kim had continued to work at the company “as normal,” he would be up for retirement this year. But instead of retirement, he’s in the middle of a rooftop protest. The previous afternoon, on Apr. 2, Kim and Lee In-geun, head of the Cort chapter of the Korean Metal Workers’ Union, visited the company to ask Park Young-ho, the company president, to bring a better proposal to the negotiating table than he’s offered so far. For more than two months after the end of the year, labor and management held eight rounds of negotiations that had showed some promise but ultimately concluded without any progress. And so on Mar. 9, Kim and the other two laid off workers who have been fighting to get their jobs back for 13 years moved their encampment from Gwanghwamun to the area in front of the Cort Guitars corporate headquarters in the Deungchon neighborhood.

On Mar. 14, three days after the move, one of the three protesters, a man named Lim Jae-chun, launched a hunger strike. What these three people want is an apology for being laid off, honorary reinstatement before they reach retirement age, and compensation for their period of termination. But since the company still hadn’t responded more than 20 days into the hunger strike, Kim finally took his struggle to the rooftop.

Few could have imagined that this man, after working at Cort for seven years, would suddenly be laid off in 2007 when the company moved its operations overseas. Who would have thought that he would wage a 13-year struggle with the company, and ultimately spend his 60th birthday, regarded as a major milestone in Korea, on a rooftop in the chilly wind.

“I also took pride in President Park Young-ho’s ambition to gain a global reputation for building high-quality guitars. It was so unfair that we lost our jobs all of a sudden just because we’d set up a labor union,” Kim said.

“I first started my struggle to be reinstated because I wanted justice, but as time went by, I learned about problems at other companies and realized this wasn’t just an issue for me personally but for our society. I also felt a sense of duty and responsibility to get this resolved. On top of that, a high court found that the layoff at Cort hadn’t been caused by financial difficulties at the company, but its decision was reversed by the Supreme Court. And now we’ve learned that that was all part of the judicial scandal under former Chief Justice Yang Seung-tae!” I could hear the boldness in Kim’s voice as he spoke to me by mobile phone.

On Wednesday, the Joint Committee for Victory in the Struggle at Cort Guitars held a simple 60th birthday celebration in front of the company headquarters. A number of presents were brought for Kim, including a framed handwritten letter by Baek Ki-wan, an inscription by Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, and a photo album by photographers Noh Sun-taek and Jung Take-yong, who have been taking photographs of Kim and his colleagues for a long time. A concert and photo exhibition were among the other events at the birthday celebration.

But the subject of the festivities had to watch from the rooftop, without being able to sit at the head of the table. The only presents that made their way up to Kim were Noh and Jung’s photo album and two items of clothing, which were hoisted to the rooftop by ropes. Kim said, “I’m so grateful for these precious gifts and don’t know how I ought to respond. They make me wonder what I could’ve done to deserve such things.”

When Kim was fired, his youngest son was in the fifth grade of elementary school; this spring, that same son has returned to university, now in his third year, after completing his military service. While Kim wandered around Daejeon, Incheon and Seoul in search of a way to get his job back, he didn’t have much of a chance to see his boy growing up into a young man. In the year that his second daughter entered university, the family had so much trouble raising tuition that his first daughter had to take a leave of absence from her own university studies, delaying her career. So as a father, Kim regrets not being able to give his children what they needed, when they needed it. Kim is grateful to his wife, who has let him pursue his cause though she prefers not to hear about it at home. When Kim’s children complained, his wife told them not to make a fuss about it because it was something that she and her husband had to do.

Apr. 7 is the day that Kim is planning to have a birthday party with his beloved family members. But it’s not clear that Kim will actually get to sit down with them for a meal and say, “It’s all over now. I know how hard all of this has been for you.” This is how Kim put it: “I can’t come down from the roof until the president promises to personally join the negotiations with a better proposal. Honor isn’t something that only belongs to businesspeople. We worked at this company, and we have our honor, too. We should be able to keep that honor by being reinstated, even if it’s only for a month or two.”

“The executive who’s in charge of labor issues is currently on a business trip to Indonesia, so we don’t have any remarks to make at this time,” a Cort spokesperson said in a telephone call with the Hankyoreh.

By Cho Hye-jeong, staff reporter

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