hankyoreh

President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol visits Chuncheon Station in Gangwon Province on May 4. (pool photo)

According to the policy tasks the incoming administration says it plans to tackle over the next five years, the Yoon Suk-yeol administration will be focusing on privatization, the restructuring of public institutions, and increasing the flexibility of the labor market. Critics say Yoon’s neoliberal policy keynote runs counter to the demands for greater governmental accountability and duties touched off by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yoon’s transition team announced on Tuesday 110 policy tasks the Yoon administration intends to prioritize during its term, which seemed intended to set up the foundation for industrial privatization in the fields of health care and social welfare.

In aiming to “establish energy security and create new energy industries and markets,” the Yoon administration specifically suggested that it would “found an electricity market based on competition and market principles.” Through such efforts, the incoming administration hopes to “foster a transparent and reasonable electricity market and pricing system operated by market principles,” the announcement read.

On April 28, when Yoon’s transition team announced its five policy directions for the normalization of energy policy, it stated that it would “incrementally open up the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) from its sales monopoly and cultivate various demand management service companies.”

Though some pointed out that opening up the sales structure for electricity to the market virtually meant the privatization of the electricity market, the transition team explained that it “never discussed the privatization of KEPCO” and “meant that the electricity market should adopt a competitive market structure.” But concerns still remain that stigmatizing KEPCO — which has been responsible for providing stable supplies of electricity rather than profiting off of the public good — as a “monopoly” suggests that the Yoon administration is considering the privatization of the market.

Another one of the Yoon administration’s policy tasks — the legislation of a basic law for the development of the service industry — can also be seen as laying the foundation for privatization.

The law would stipulate industries excluding agriculture, forestry, and fishery and manufacturing — such as health care, social welfare, education, media, and information and communications — as belonging to the service industry and enable their privatization. Since being proposed through government legislation in 2011 during the Lee Myung-bak administration, the law has been repeatedly submitted then abandoned in the last 11 years due to concerns that it would lead to the privatization of health care. Three relevant bills proposed my Democratic Party lawmaker Lee Won-wook and People Power Party lawmakers Choo Kyung-ho and Yoo Sung-kull are pending in the National Assembly’s Strategy and Finance Committee.

The Yoon administration also forewarned government restructuring, stating that increasing the efficiency of public institutions’ independent manpower, incentivizing the reorganization of mutual investment companies, and regularly and continuously inspecting and rearranging the operations of public institutions would bring about innovation within government offices.

In regard to this, the public transportation union of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions said that “[the Yoon administration] is saying that public institutions should take initiative to restructure themselves,” making known its opposition to such a move by adding, “What public institutions need right now is not the reduction of functions nor the introduction of market principles through restructuring.”

“As the role of the state is expanded, there’s a need to address some of the areas where duties overlap, but when you leave restructuring up to public institutions without making it clear what essential duties that state needs to perform, the result is chaos and a lack of coordination,” explained Woo Seok-jin, a professor of economics at Myongji University, in a telephone interview with the Hankyoreh on Wednesday.

Yoon’s philosophy of “labor flexibility,” which he had spoken of before in terms of a “120-hour work week,” has been further fleshed out with features such as increased choice in working hours, expansion of the optional working hour calculation period from its current one to three months, and deregulation of working hours for startups and professional positions.

His attitude toward the Serious Accidents Punishment Act — which he has referred to as “detrimental to businesspeople’s willingness to do business” — has translated into government tasks that include “adjusting laws related to industrial safety and health” and “strengthening industrial accident prevention and reducing fatal accidents at a practical level by supporting the creation and expansion of autonomous safety and public health management systems by companies.”

In a statement, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions said, “The expansion of the optional working hour calculation period originates in the demands of employer groups who want to have their employees doing concentrated periods of long working hours.”

“The ‘adjusting laws related to industrial safety and health’ is a reference to the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, and it is about providing room for management supervisors and corporations to wiggle out of investigations and trials,” it added.

Kim Cheol, a senior research fellow at the Public Policy Institute for People, compared the rhetoric to “a broken record repeating the ‘gospel of neoliberalism,’ which has already been declared bankrupt at the global level.”

“This shows a disregard for the reality, where most countries have been increasing the role of the state to respond to the economic crises and severe inequality caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said.

By Lee Jae-hoon, staff reporter

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