Union Organizers Frequently Seized, Hassled : S. Korea Suffers Labor Unrest

SEOUL, South Korea —  Union organizing here is a bit like urban guerrilla warfare.

Take the people, about a dozen of them, who work in an office of the Urban Industrial Mission, a church group involved until recently in helping workers organize independent trade unions.

“This month they all answer to animal names,” an interpreter told a reporter recently. “Next month they will call themselves ‘Broom,’ ‘Sink’ and other kitchen utensils.”

Why? “The phones are tapped,” he said.

Across the street, plainclothes policemen have taken over a funeral parlor, and they question everyone who leaves the house that contains the mission office.

In South Korea, union organizing is regarded as “interfering in labor-management relations” and is punishable by up to three years in prison. Two months ago, the mission’s office was raided and its files were confiscated. A summary court sentenced some of the mission’s workers to brief prison terms for “spreading false rumors.”

Now, according to a member who is currently going by the code name “Alligator,” the mission has “given up telling workers to try to create their own unions.”

“We recognize,” he said, “that unless we institute a government that is more responsive to popular demands, nothing will change.”

In recent months, South Korea’s factories have become a battleground in the fight between the authoritarian government of President Chun Doo Hwan and its increasingly radical opponents, many of whom, like Alligator, blame Washington’s support of Chun for the Korean workers’ low standard of living and for the absence of basic labor freedom in South Korea.

“The profits made from Korea’s exports are divided up among foreign capitalists, domestic monopoly capital, the dictatorship and the workers,” Alligator said. “In this scheme, the Korean worker is the least rewarded for his efforts.”

It is not known to what extent the mission and other organizations are succeeding in politicizing South Korea’s workers, who average 57 hours a week on the job for as little as $4.50 a day.

But activity on the labor front is clearly on the rise. According to government figures, labor disputes in 1985 were up 135% from the previous year. And an official in the Labor Ministry said they are up somewhat this year, too.

Last month, police in Seoul took into custody more than 200 people in labor-related incidents. In the industrial city of Inchon, rioting workers burned down a police substation.

Western diplomats and local human rights groups say there are at present between 60 and 80 people in jail for labor-related offenses. About 800 others are said to be on a blacklist.

Wages are a major issue, but an increasing number of demonstrations at South Korean factories have called for an end to the military dictatorship and a revision of the South Korean Constitution to allow direct popular presidential elections.

The Samkyung Garment Co. is typical of many large South Korean firms where organizers and other activists are working. On March 24, a dozen of the 680 or more employees carried out an illegal demonstration there.

Suh Heung, a director of Samkyung’s parent firm, Kolon International, insists that the company was “targeted by political activists.” Kolon is one of 30 big industrial conglomerates that together account for 65% of South Korea’s gross national product.

“We are a large company,” Suh said, “our wages are higher than elsewhere, and our work hours are shorter.”

At an office of the Urban Industrial Mission near the Samkyung factory, one of the women who took part in the demonstration was limping. She said she had been kicked by male employees.

The woman, who asked not to be identified, said she and two others were fired by Samkyung for having associated with university students working in the factory.

“The police follow home anyone who has an interest in labor issues,” she said. “Then they ask the neighbors if the worker reads books on labor history or politics.”

A worker in the mission office said: “We are not only struggling for higher wages. We are fighting fascism, too.”

Not long after Chun came to power in a military coup in 1980, he ordered sweeping changes in South Korea’s labor laws. It is possible today for the government to order a union to change its executives, to demand that the minutes of union meetings be turned over to the authorities, to order a union dissolved.

Must Give Notice

Workers planning to strike must give 60 days’ notice to their employer, and at the end of the 60 days the workers must submit to a 30-day cooling off period followed by arbitration by a labor council whose key members are appointed by the government.

Changes in the labor laws under Chun have also made it difficult to organize independent unions. According to sources in the labor movement, the law provides that there can be no more than one union at any given firm, and when management learns that the workers plan to organize a union it quickly puts in an application to form a company union dominated by its own personnel. The government, these sources say, tends to act more quickly on applications of this kind than on applications submitted by the workers themselves.

Thus the changes have weakened the country’s 17 large industrial unions. Since that time, the number of company unions has increased, but total union membership has declined from about 1.1 million to 715,000, according to figures provided by the Korean Federation of Trade Unions.

Moreover, unions are prohibited by law from taking part in political activities, and third parties, including representatives of national unions, cannot give bargaining advice to local unions.

The Reagan Administration will be required this summer to take a close look at South Korea’s labor record. When Congress agreed two years ago to renew the Generalized System of Preferences--under which about $1.5 billion in South Korean products enter the United States either duty-free or at concessionary tariff rates--the lawmakers insisted that any extension of the preferences would be contingent on respect for “internationally recognized worker rights.”

According to Western diplomats and labor observers, South Korea’s labor problems have less to do with wages and working conditions than with the survival of the Chun government.

“I, too, would be suspicious of students and the church getting into unions,” one foreign labor observer said. “They are trying to exploit the situation to their own advantage. For them, the more downtrodden the worker, the better.”

The labor analyst also warned against quick condemnation of South Korean government officials and employers for the country’s comparatively low wages and poor working conditions.

“The government has a Confucian obligation to provide full employment to its people,” he said. “This has resulted in a lot of people doing make-work for subsistence wages.”

The government painted itself into a corner a few years ago by increasing unversity enrollment quotas in order to reduce the number of unemployed young people. As a result, as many as 50% of all university graduates cannot find jobs, and employers will not give blue-collar jobs to people with university degrees for fear that they will try to infiltrate their factories.

Between 400 and 1,000 people are estimated to have lied about their university backgrounds in order to get blue-collar jobs and set about organizing the workers. The government is engaged in a campaign to get rid of them.

Some foreigners here have serious reservations about the methods used by the Urban Industrial Mission, but they tend to blame the government for Korea’s contentious labor climate. A Western diplomat said, “At present, there are no means to solve conflicts when they arise.”

Other experts suggest that the South Korean government’s concern with internal security makes it extremely unlikely that there will be any growth of independent trade unions.

Government Touchy on Subject

One reason for the government’s sensitivity to organized labor is the fact that Chun’s mentor and predecessor, Park Chung Hee, was assassinated as a result of discord among his security advisers on the handling of massive labor riots in the Pusan and Masan industrial areas. The riots broke out on Oct. 16, 1979, and Park was killed on Oct. 26.

The Economic Planning Board has encouraged employers to keep wages low in order to make capital investments, but a Western official commented: “I am not convinced that low wages is the sole reason for the government’s hostility toward unions. Rather, labor, if organized, could become a formidable body that could link up with students, clergy and politicians, and as a combined force they could threaten the government.”

But according to Ronald Rogers, a former Peace Corps worker who is researching South Korean labor problems, the government has achieved exactly the opposite of what it set out to do when it weakened the national industral unions in 1980.

As Rogers put it in a recently published paper, the result has been that “workers who find that the (company) unions do not represent their interests have nowhere else (but the mission) to turn.”

At one of the mission’s offices, a mission worker said it was the failure, in 1984, of workers at the Hyopchin Electronics Co. to set up their own union that caused the mission to stop trying to organize independent unions.

“The government sat on the application while each person wanting to form the union was individually interviewed,” the mission worker said. “The leader was fired and the parents of potential members were told to put pressure on their offspring not to mingle with Communists.”

In frustration, the workers occupied the offices of the Korea Metalworkers Union. They were evicted by the police and a number were sentenced to prison.

But an official at the Ministry of Labor insisted that workers have only to report that they want to form a union. The authorities, he said, do not have the power to deny permission.

Ministry officials contend that there is “misunderstanding among foreigners about the situation of labor in South Korea.”

Asked about the need for 60 days’ notice of strikes and the 30-day cooling off period, Kim Ki Duk, head of the ministry’s Labor Policy Division, said: “Our people are very impatient. They cannot wait for their food in a restaurant.

“Our inspectors try to explain (the cooling-off period) to workers but sometimes they don’t listen. They burn things and destroy equipment, and then the police come. This is misunderstood in foreign countries, and it appears as if we are preventing workers from engaging in collective bargaining.”

Most Aren’t Convinced

Most Koreans do not seem to be convinced by such arguments. A South Korean newspaper recently drew attention to some employers’ heavy reliance on the police in solving labor-management problems.

In March, the operators of two textile firms where workers were demonstrating delivered busloads of the workers to Seoul police stations and demanded that they be arrested. When the police refused, one company put its people back on the bus and drove them around Seoul’s traffic-clogged streets for four hours as punishment. The workers, most of them women, were released after passers-by heard their cries for help.

Commenting on this incident, the newspaper Dong A Ilbo said, “As we (South Koreans) put such a high priority on order, strikes are often settled by physical force, and employers call the police at the slightest provocation.”

Researcher Rogers said the “police and security agents play a greater role in the resolution of labor disputes than the official labor authorities do.”

The government insists that it keeps a close watch on abuses by management as well, but a Western official said, “It is difficult to believe that they are pursuing such violations with the same zeal as what we see in their campaigns against disguised workers.”

The government is reported to be considering a number of reforms for the future. These include a minimum wage of 100,000 won a month, or $113, and a revision of the labor law to guarantee greater rights for workers. At present, it is difficult to judge what impact the reforms will have on the lives of ordinary workers.

In the case of the minimum wage law, Labor Ministry officials insist that only 160,000 workers--2% of the labor force--now earn less than 100,000 won. When benefits and bonuses are added, “no one earns below 100,000 won in Korea today,” one official said.

Asked when the reforms might be adopted, he said, “Sometime during the next five-year plan.”