hankyoreh

Kim Jin-pyo (left)

Kim Jin-pyo, head of President Moon Jae-in’s governance planning advisory committee, said on May 28 that achieving a “grand social accord” would first require “reflection from the chaebol.”

Kim‘s message was that reflection from South Korea’s biggest corporate conglomerates would be prerequisite for the tripartite labor/management/government accord cited by the new administration as a chief means of achieving income-driven growth. A grand social accord was attempted under the Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-08) administrations, but ended up halted because of objections and nonparticipation by the labor community.

Kim‘s remarks came during a briefing that day at the Financial Supervisory Service training center in Seoul’s Tongui neighborhood.

“Labor reforms were the biggest reforms attempted during the past ten years of conservative administrations, but they resulted in deep societal frictions and conflict with nothing really to show for them,” Kim said.

“Labor reforms will also be needed under the Moon Jae-in administration,” he added.

Kim went on to say the issue of labor reforms would “only be resolved with small concessions from the groups with the greatest vested interests in our society.”

“A grand social accord among labor, management, and government will only be achievable when we have a ‘holy trinity’ of chaebol reforms and economic democratization reforms [in addition to labor reforms],” he argued.

Kim sent a warning to business community on May 26 by saying chaebol were “mistaken in their insistence on carrying on as they are and never letting go of their vested interests.”

Kim also noted that countries in Western Europe “produced a labor/management/government accord by harnessing their wisdom through a similar experience to ours.” The remark appeared to be a reference to the Netherlands, which weathered an economic crisis at a time of intensifying labor-management conflict and rising unemployment in the early 1980s when labor, management, and the government signed the Wassenaar Agreement - which contained corporate job guarantees in exchange for labor‘s restraint in demanding wage increases - and to Germany’s Hartz Reforms in the early ‘00s, which were founded in a societal agreement to pursue labor flexibility while creating jobs.

For the Moon administration, a social accord is a key effort toward job creation. The very first of his directions after taking office was to establish a national jobs commission. Headed by Moon himself, the commission is strongly geared toward societal dialogue, with 11 members participating at the ministerial level alone and 15 representatives from the labor community (including the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions [KCTU]) and private sector (including business community representatives from the Korea Employers Federation). Moon is also pushing plans to include groups representing irregular workers and small businesses on the current tripartite commission.

Social accord efforts and tripartite dialogue have been all but extinct since fizzling during the Roh administration. The Lee Myung-bak administration (2008-13) refused to acknowledge the labor community as a dialogue partner at all. Under the Park Geun-hye administration (2013-17), labor-government relations reached an all-time low after a Korean Railway Workers’ Union strike was used in 2013 as an excuse for investigative authorities to raid KCTU headquarters and the Korean Teachers‘ and Education Workers’ Union had its legal union status revoked.

The labor world has responded favorably to the strong message sent by the Moon administration to the business community, but is on the fence about rejoining a societal dialogue mechanism.

“It does seem like a step forward that the administration first mentioned issues of chaebol responsibility,” a KCTU source said in a telephone interview with the Hankyoreh.

“Societal dialogue is something that should come after there have first been labor-government negotiations where the government regains the labor community‘s trust and the two sides communicate,” the official said.

A Federation of Korean Trade Unions source sent a similar message.

“Before talking about societal dialogue, the administration first needs to establish trust with labor by executing its past pledges through administrative measures,” the source said.

By Kim Kyung-rok and Park Tae-woo, staff reporters

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