Abstract:
The
Korean Working Class: From Mass Strike to Casualization and Retreat, 1987-2007
Loren
Goldner
ABSTRACT
Similar
to patterns that have been played out in Spain and Portugal (1974-76) as well
as in Brazil (1978-83) since the mid-1970’s, the Korean working class in the
late 1980’s destroyed the foundations of a decades-old military dictatorship
with remarkable mass strikes in the years 1987-1990. The strikes resulted in
the creation, briefly (1990-1994) of radical democratic unions and in high wage
increases across the board. But, as in other cases, the working class was
relegated to a battering ram for a “democratic” political agenda that quickly
embraced globalization and the neo-liberal mantra of free markets. In fact,
even before the strike wave but particularly thereafter, Korean capital was
already investing abroad and pushing neo-liberal austerity at home. In 1997-98,
the Asian financial crisis forced Korea under the tutelage of the IMF and
greatly accelerated the casualization of the Korean working class which had
been the main capitalist riposte to the breakthroughs of the late 1980’s.
Today, at least 60% of the work force is casualized in the most brutal way,
subject to instantaneous layoffs and half or less the wages of the 10% of the work
force classified as “regular workers”. The bureaucratic remnants of the radical
democratic unions of the early 1990’s are today reviled corporative
organizations of that working-class elite, and as many struggles take place
between regular and casualized workers as against capital itself.
Part
One: Historical Background
Starting
in June 1987 and continuing in significant ways until 1990, the strike wave
known in Korea as the Great Workers’ Struggle (Nodongja Taettujaeng) ranks with
Polish Solidarnosc (1980-81), the Iranian workers councils of (1979-1981) and
the Brazilian strike wave of 1978-1983 as one of the foremost episodes of
working-class struggle of the 1980’s. The strike wave shatterered the
foundations of almost uninterrupted dictatorship following the end of the
Korean War, won significant wage increases for large sectors of the Korean
working class, and briefly established (from 1990 to 1994) radical democratic unions in the
National Congress of Trade Unions (ChoNoHyop), committed at least verbally to
anti-capitalism.
No
sooner had this strike wave triumphed when its gains began to be seriously
undermined. The ChoNoHyop was destroyed by government repression of its best
militants and government promotion of the more conservative activists to form
the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (Minju Nochong or
KCTU), starting in 1995; in December 1996, the Korean government attempted to
ram through a labor casualization law that the KCTU half-heartedly opposed in
the January 1997 general strike. In the fall of 1997, the Asian financial
meltdown brought South Korea under the tutelage of the IMF in exchange
for a $57 billion bailout, with the IMF explicitly demanding casualization of
labor and mass layoffs as part of its restructuring program. In December 1997
long-time democratic oppositionist Kim Dae Jong was elected president of Korea,
and in Febuary 1998 he brought the KCTU into the “historic agreement” to accept
hundreds of thousands of layoffs and downsizings in accord with IMF demands, in
exchange for full legalization.
For
window dressing, the Kim Dae Jong government in 1998 also established the
Tripartite Commission of state, capital and labor along corporatist lines, a
meaningless body which has acted, of course, only on behalf of the state and
capital.
In
spite of this grim tableau and almost unending series of setbacks, the Korean
working class has had to be beaten down step by step, with long, bitter strikes
such as (?????? KT, Hyundai, KIA), and recent events show that this combativity
is far from eliminated.
Today,
twenty years after the Great Workers’ Struggle of 1987, the Korean labor
situation has evolved into one of the most successful capitalist casualizations
in the world, certainly in any advanced industrial country. Approximately 10%
of the Korean work force is organized in KCTU unions with regular jobs and
salaries, while another 60% is casualized, outsourced and downsized. At Hyundai
Motor Company, for example, one of the bastions of the industrial militancy of
1987-90, regular workers and casual workers work side by side, doing exactly
the same jobs, with the casuals earning 50% of the wages of the regular workers
(the latter earning between $50,000 and $60,000 per year, plus bonuses and
overtime). The KCTU is broadly hated in the casualized working class as a
corporatist mouthpiece for the highly-paid regular workers, and regular workers
for their part have even physically attacked casual workers when the latter
wildcat (as happened for example at Kia Motor Company in August 2007). In the
recent (December 2007) elections, large numbers of workers voted for the
hard-right One Nation Party (Hanaratang) presidential candidate Lee Myoung
Back,
former
Hyundai CEO and mayor of Seoul, in the vain hope of a return to the expansive
economy of the 1970’s and 1980’s.
How
the Korean working class went from offensive struggle and victory to
casualization and retreat in a mere two decades, then, is the subject of this
article.
We
would do well to situate the experience of the Korean working class in the
larger cycle of transitions from dictatorship to (bourgeois) democracy,
starting in Spain and Portugal (1974-1976), and continuing in such countries as
Poland and Brazil. We can also note that, after the Iberian
“transitions”, the subsequent explosions took place during a period of rollback
and retreat in the North American and European working classes.
Indeed,
they took place in the overall context of world economic crisis following the
end of the post-World War II boom. In Iberia, Poland and Brazil, as in South
Korea, a major working-class intervention in politics and society was preceded
by a lengthy period of intensive “economic growth” (of highly varying quality)
and intensive repression of independent working class activity,
organization
and wages. In each case, workers’ struggles were central to the battle of the
broader “democratic opposition” against dictatorship, and in each case, the
broader “democratic opposition” took power and implemented (always in close
collaboration with international capital) tough austerity
programs that fragmented the working- class movement. One might conclude that
“democracy sells austerity” and that, indeed, is my conclusion.
The
Korean case, of course, has many specifics that should not be submerged in any
general comparison.
Korea
was, in 1960, considered an economic “basket case”, as poor on a per capita
basis as India or Tanzania. In 1996, with great fanfare, it was welcomed into
the OECD as an “advanced economy” and only one year later (as indicated) fell
under the control of the IMF.
Nevertheless,
Korea, one of the Asian “tigers” alongside Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore,
stood out in the period 1960-1997 as one of a handful of success stories, set
against the hundred failures and retrogression of Third World countries that
were recipients of Western “aid” and IMF and World Bank tutelage.
What
made Korea different? We can immediately cite its special status (like the
other tigers) as a “showcase” outpost of American imperialism, whose economic
success was an important propaganda counterweight to the (so-called) socialist
regimes in the immediate vicinity, namely North Korea, China and the Soviet
Union. The United States, with tens of thousands of troops in South Korea after the end of the Korean War, tolerated
statist development policies there that it routinely opposed or subverted in
the rest of the underdeveloped world.
Second,
South Korea, like Taiwan, was different from almost all other Third World
countries by the agrarian reform which eliminated the pre-capitalist “yangban”
aristocracy between 1945 and 1950. (This reform took place under the intense
pressure of the agrarian reform in the north, one extended to the south when
Kim il-sung’s armies briefly captured almost the entire peninsula in the early
months of the war.)
Third,
South Korea, poor in natural resources and flattened in the hostilities of
1950-1953, is the country par excellence of “human capital”, with a heavy
emphasis on, not to say mania for education. Even in 1960, there was 90% adult
literacy, hardly the case in then-comparable Third World countries.
The
country was divided at the 38th parallel in 1945 by the occupying armies of the
U.S. and the Soviet Union. The defeat of Japan in World War II ended 35 years
of Japanese colonial rule, the latter having been an important moment in laying
the foundations of a modern capitalist economy (the exact legacy of this period
is controversial to this day).
When
the Japanese occupiers fled in August 1945, one to two million workers in the
US zone built workers’ councils in the abandoned factories, less from any
specific commitment to worker self-management (the Korean left was
overwhelmingly Stalinist) than from sheer necessity of producing the
basics of daily life. This system of workers’ councils was duly shut down by
the U.S. occupation authorities in December 1945.
As
in the European countries occupied by Nazi Germany and whose bourgeoisies had
also been collaborators, the Korean yangban and small capitalist class were
politically and socially discredited. From such motley forces, the U.S.
occupation had to cobble together a viable government capable of defeating the
aroused workers and peasants, many of whom were strongly favorable to Kim
il-Sung and his guerrilla forces, and generally in favor of radical change. The
U.S. seized upon the figure of Rhee Syngman, and oversaw and participated in
the merciless crushing of the left in the southern zone in five years of partisan warfare and massacres
prior to the outbreak of the war with North Korea in June 1950. Whatever
remained of a serious left in 1950 was physically eliminated during the war
years or fled to the North (where many of them were also eliminated). The
continuity with the pre-1945 Korean left in the south was entirely broken, a
factor that played no small role in the reawakening that began in the 1970’s.
Rhee
Syngman ruled a generally inept, economically stagnant South Korea until 1960,
propped up entirely by American military support and aid. He was finally
overthrown in riots led by students in 1960, and South Korea enjoyed a brief
democratic opening. This opening was closed again by the coup d’etat of Park
Chung-hee in 1961, and a new era began.
Park
Chung-hee was not, or at least not only the typical American-supported two-bit
puppet dictator of the post-World War II period. He is widely believed (though
to my knowledge no definitive proof has come to light) to have been a Communist as early as 1943, and in 1948 he was arrested
as part of a Communist study group of young officers. When he seized power in
1961, the U.S. initially hesitated to recognize him, and several times during
his dictatorial rule (1961-1979) distrusted his nationalist impulses (as in his
independent nuclear power program) and his occasional diplomatic flirtations
with North Korea.
Further,
Park had been educated at a Japanese military academy during World War II, and
was greatly enamored of the Japanese economic development model, which he
promptly attempted to emulate in South Korea, with a certain success. Since the
Japanese model had in turn been copied from the Prussian model
in the late 19th century, South Korea acquired a certain “German” veneer which
is generally obscured under the highly-disputed (and often obscured) Japanese
legacy. Park’s constitution, for example, was written by a Korean jurist who studied law in Germany
in the 1950’s, and who became enamored with the theories of Carl Schmitt; hence
“state of emergency” was a cornerstone of Park’s ideology. Ahn Ho Sang, who had
been openly pro-Nazi in the 1930’s and had studied in Germany in the Hitler
period, wrote the high school history manuals with the kind of
hyper-nationalist mythmaking inherited from German romantic populism.
More
fundamentally, Park cracked down on the parasitic capitalists of the Rhee
period and either eliminated them or dragooned them into productive investment.
He implemented the “New Village” (Se Maul) policy in the countryside, designed
to fully capitalize agriculture and force large rural populations into the cities
and into industrial employment. Through the Cold War anti-Communist Federation
of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), the regime exercised a draconian control over
labor, with seven-day, 12-hour shift work weeks not untypical. During the Park
era, the famous chaebol (conglomerates) rose to pre-eminence, under state
control of credit and selection of “national champion” industries, the practice
later denounced as “crony capitalism” when the Korean economy ran into trouble
in the 1990’s.
Korea,
like the other tigers and unlike most Third World countries in that period,
developed by making its way, with an export-oriented strategy, up the
international “product chain”, beginning with textiles and other light consumer
industries, then proceeding to manufacture (auto, shipbuilding) and finally to
high-tech, capturing important world markets for computer
components by the 1990’s.
The
economic success of the Park chung-hee decades, obviously, cannot be separated
from the international conjuncture (a reality widely overlooked today in
debates about South Korea’s mounting economic problems). In addition to
benefiting from its high profile in U.S. Cold War geopolitical
strategy, the South Korea economy also rode the
growing wave of industrial investment which, beginning ca. 1965, began
to search for venues outside of North America and Europe. Remuneration of
Koreans abroad also played a significant role, as South Korean
troops repatriated millions of dollars from service in the Vietnam War and tens
of thousands of South Korean workers went to the Middle East to work on
construction projects in the post-1973 oil boom.
Given
the centrality of light manufacture in the 1960’s “takeoff” period, then, the
rebirth of the Korean working-class movement not accidentally began in the
textile industries, and also not accidentally (since the work force was
predominantly made up of young women) by women workers.
The
contemporary Korean workers’ movement marks its symbolic beginning from
November 13, 1970, when Jeon Tae-il, a young textile worker, immolated himself
at a small demonstration in one of Seoul’s sweatshop districts. Jeon had
previously pursued every legal form of redress for the sweatshop workforce, to
no avail.
The
movement of the 1970’s was characterized by a rising number of strikes
conducted in the most extreme conditions by women textile workers. The demands
were simple and straightforward, aimed
at the inhuman working hours, low wages, authoritarian foremen and enforced
dormitory life of the women, who were generally recruited directly from the
countryside and from the shantytowns that sprang up around Seoul and other
cities. The strikes were met almost without exception with brutal repression by
factory security personnel, police, soldiers and hired thugs from the Korean
underworld. The struggle for a democratic union at the Dongil Textile Company
in Inchon from 1972 to 1976 was exemplary in this regard.
The
1970’s also saw the beginnings of involvement in the workers’ movement by
(mainly Christian) religious groups and radical students (the latter known as
“hakchul”, or “coming from the university”). The religious groups were inspired
by Catholic liberation theology and similar Protestant social doctrines. The
religious groups and students formed night schools for textile workers,
teaching literacy and secretarial skills but also basic workers’ rights.
The
1970’s, finally, saw the rise of the minjung (popular culture) movement,
closely connected to the religious and early hakchul movement. The largely
middle-class minjung movement reached into Korean popular culture, fast eroding
under the impact of forced-march modernization, and
attempted to utilize it in the creation of a “counter-culture of struggle”
using music and dance from Korean shamanism and rural peasant traditions,
creations that were successful in solidifying group determination to struggle
against very heavy odds and repression. To this day, singing, reminiscent of
the American IWW, remains an important part of the Korean workers’ movement,
with demonstrations and strikes singing dozens of songs that everyone knows by
heart.
The
Korean movement of the 1970’s, whether labor or hakchul or minjung or
religious, remained very much in the framework of liberal democratic ideology
and tended to look sympathetically to the United States as a force that would
steer the Korean dictatorship toward democracy. All this changed with
the Kwangju uprising and subsequent massacre of May 1980.
Korea
has historically been a country of intense regional loyalties, loyalties which
have persisted into the era of modern capitalism. Cholla province, in the
southwest, has traditionally been a region of agriculture and backwardness.
Park chung-hee, on the other hand, was from the southeastern Gwangjeon
province, and his industrial policies were primarily directed there, giving
rise to the major centers of Ulsan, Pohang, and Pusan. The people of Cholla
province resented this neglect.
In
1979, mass demonstrations were sweeping the country, demanding democracy.
Workers were in the forefront of many of these demonstrations. In October of
that year, Park chung-hee was
assassinated by the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency allegedly after an argument about how to contain and
repress the demonstrations.
A
brief democratic opening similar to 1960 took place, but Park was succeeded by
another military dictator, Chun Doo Hwan. In May 1980, the army fired on a
demostration in Kwangju, the largest city in Cholla province. The result was an
uprising in which the population of Kwangju took control of the city, armed
themselves with weapons from a military armory, and fought the
forces of repression, including an elite unit withdrawn from the DMZ with North
Korea, for days. Estimates of the total dead on both sides (most of them obviously
from the repression of the revolt) in Kwangju run as high as 2000.
Kwangju
was sealed off and extreme censorship prevented any serious information from
leaking out. (Korea’s draconian National Security Law made it a serious crime,
well into the 1990’s, to discuss the Kwangju uprising in public.) .It was
however widely believed that the U.S. government, smarting from the recent
overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, in the midst of the Tehran hostage
crisis, and wanting no more mass radical movements against pro-U.S. dictators,
had been deeply involved in the decision to use extreme force (a belief greatly
strengthened by more recent disclosure of documents on government-to-government
communication during the crisis).
From
that point onward, the Korean movement shifted quickly away from the liberal
democratic and religious ideologies of the 1970’s to a more radical,
essentially “Marxist-Leninist” orientation to revolution.
This
ideological turn shows the importance of the whole earlier period: the virtually
total discontinuity with the left that emerged after the Japanese collapse in
1945 and which was destroyed by government and U.S. military repression between
1945 and 1953; the decades of dictatorship after the Korean War which branded
the mildest social criticism as North-inspired; the isolation of South Korea
from the world ferment of the 1960’s and beyond. (When Korean students joined
underground opposition groups in the 1970’s and 1980’s, one of the first tasks
was often to learn Japanese, in order to read all the political (and
particularly Marxist) books which could not be published in Korea.) Thus the
decades-long erosion of Stalinism as it was lived in Europe and the U.S., the
impact of 1968 and the Western New Left, the radical critique of Leninism, the
Hegel renaissance and the impact of the popularization of the 1840’s Marx, were
all unknown or seen through a glass darkly in South Korea. (In
the early 1980’s, a clandestine study group formed to read Lukacs’s and Hegel’s
writings on aesthetics—in German—and was discovered; its members were sentenced
to six months in prison.) The result was that the radicalization of the Korean
movement after Kwangju proceeded almost invariably along Stalinist,
“Marxist-Leninist” lines, pro-Soviet, pro-China, pro-North Korea, but Stalinist
across the board. Trotsky was little known until the late 1980’s, to say
nothing of left-wing critiques of Trotsky.
Some
of the Marxist-Leninist factions that emerged in the 1980’s were the starting
point of the two major tendencies in the organized Korean movement today (in
both the previously-mentioned KCTU and the Korean Democratic Labor Party or
KDLP). Those factions are the “National Liberation” (NL, or juche-ists, so
called because of North Korea’s “juche” or self-reliance doctrine) essentially
pro-North Korea) and the large minority “People’s Democracy” (PD, more Social
Democratic). In the run-up to the December 2007 presidential election, the
Juche-ists took full control of the apparatus of the KDLP, and purged many PD
members.
(It is also important to note that both the NL and PD factions have their base
mainly in white-collar unions, such as banking, teachers and other civil
servants, whereas blue-collar workers are largely indifferent to both. Under NL
leadership, the KDLP vote nationwide dropped in the December 2007 elections
from 5 to 3%, and in Ulsan, the bastion of the Korean working class, from 11 to
8%.)
Nationalism
is endemic in Korea, including in the working-class movement. The reasons for
this are to be found in the centuries of foreign domination (Chinese, then
Japanese, then American), the post-1945 division of the country, and Korea’s
geopolitical position at the “crossroads” of Chinese, Japanese,
Russian and American spheres of influence. The Korean peninsula, or hegemony
there, was the prize of foreign intrusions centuries ago, and more recently the
China-Japan war of 1895, the Russo-Japanese war of 1904- 1905, and most recently the Korean War. “When whales
fight, the minnows run for cover” is an old Korean proverb expressing this
reality. The Japanese attempt, over 35 years (1910-1945) of colonial
domination, to virtually eliminate Korean culture further
strengthened
this nationalist impulse. Finally, myths of ethnic homogeneity, furthered by
mythic populist history textbooks or more recently historical dramas about eras
of Korean greatness on television, complete the picture. (A different, even
more virulent version of this nationalism is promoted in North Korea.) In this
context, even sports events, such as the 1988 Seoul Olympics or the successes
of the Korean team in the 2002 World Cup playoffs, become events in the forging
of national identity.
For
the same reasons, any emergence of serious class struggle in South Korea
immediately takes on an international dimension. Nationalism was hence
unquestioned in the revival of the left in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
As
a Stalinized “Marxism” pushed aside the pre-Kwangju liberal democratic
orientations of activists in the course of the 1980’s, the dominant imports
were variants of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, monopoly capital theory and
dependency theory, popularized by the Marxist-Leninist groups and by
influential underground journals.
The
1980’s also saw the acceleration of the hakchul movement into the factories, as
widespread as any comparable “turn to the working class” in Western countries
by middle-class radicals after 1968. At the peak of the movement, thousands of
ex-students had taken factory jobs, and on occasion even led important strikes.
The
Korean movement of the late 1980’s understandably viewed South Korea as a
“peripheral” country in the American imperial system, from which only
“socialism” (understood in the Stalinist sense) and national reunification
could extricate it. There was thus a tendency to underestimate the depth
of Korean industrial development and above all the elasticity in the system
that would make significantly higher wages possible within a capitalist
framework after the 1987-1990 worker revolt. Such theories were reinforced by the fact that South Korea only caught up
with and surpassed North Korea economically ca. 1980.
The
convergence of all these factors meant that the 1991 collapse of the Soviet
Union, coinciding as it did with the downturn of the workers’ struggles after
1990, took a far greater psychological toll on militants in Korea than anywhere
in the West, where the prestige of the Soviet Union had been deflating since at
least 1956 and certainly since 1968. The mood had already turned bleak in the
spring of 1991, when a Seoul student was beaten to death by police and the
democratic left candidates were crushed in the June 1991 municipal elections,
as if to underscore a sense of defeatism and futility after years of
mobilization and struggle. It could be added that the Korean economy, in a boom
phase in the 1986-88 period and the first phase of the Great Workers Struggle,
had entered new difficulties by 1990, difficulties from which it has never
fully recovered.
Very
much like comparable developments in the west after the late 1970’s, thousands
of activists gave up, withdrew into private life, attempted to pursue
middle-class careers or, in academia, succumbed to the allure of
post-modernism. A discussion of the political backdrop to the course of class
struggle is also indispensable.
Beginning
in the 1980’s, worker struggles for democratic unions shifted (along with the
Korean economy itself) from light to heavy industry. The Chun Doo Hwan military
dictatorship that succeeded Park chung-hee was forced to relax controls in the
mid-1980’s, under mounting pressure from the broader democratic opposition in
the run-up to the Pan-Asian Olympics (1986) and the Seoul Olympics (1988). In
particular, the “democratization declaration” of June 1987, made in response to
the threat that the working class would join in the pro-democracy protests, was
the immediate trigger for the Great Workers Struggle of that summer. For the
first time, the movement shifted from the Seoul-Inchon region to the new
southern industrial zones of Ulsan, Masan and Changwon. All told, there were
more than 3,000 strikes in 1987, winning unionization, 25-30% wage increases,
and abolition of the hated military discipline in factories. Ulsan, in
particular, the Hyundai company town, saw massive street mobilization and
street fighting that lasted into 1990.
The
128-day (December 1988-April 1989) strike at Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI)
culminated in a coordinated military attack on the occupied Hyundai shipyard by
9,000 soldiers and police, coming from sea, air and land. This was followed by
ten days of street fighting (mobilizing not merely workers but their wives and
children) in the working-class neighborhoods of Ulsan. This struggle in turn
was followed in 1990 by the Goliat strike, again at HHI, and which ended in
defeat.
The
ebbing away of the mass offensive struggles of the 1987-1990 period, and the
general atmosphere of defeat that ensued, opened a new phase in Korean worker
organizations. In particular, within the National Congress of Trade Unions, the
right-wing and openly reformist (pro-North Korean) National Liberation faction
began to gain the upper hand against the weakened radical
faction. As entioned earlier, a government policy of
repression aimed at the best militants in the NCTU and promotion of the open
reformists destroyed the NCTU by 1995 and led to the regroupment in the KCTU under the right-wing leadership. (Indeed, when
the NCTU was formally launched in January 1990, most of its leaders were in
jail or in hiding.)
One
important counter-measure of the radical militants was the formation of the
“hyung-jang jujik”, or shopfloor organizations, which attempted to fight the
degeneration of the unions and the KCTU with alternate organization, not
“outside” the unions but as a shadow power both within the unions and
with “horizontal” ties to militants in other unions, fighting against a trend to company-based
parochialism. The arc of the hyung-jang jujik extended from 1990 to 2005. In
different circumstances, the hyungjang jujik managed to take power in major
unions and thereupon often succumbed to bureaucratization; in their final
years, they became prey to various groups seeking a back-door route to power
in the unions, and finally collapsed. But at their best, in a generally
defensive situation, they preserved a continuity with the radical impulse of
the 1987-1990 period.
Just
after Christmas, 1996, the Korean government of Kim Young-sam, in a special
night session of parliament with no opposition present, pushed through the
first of a series of labor casualization laws aimed at bringing the South
Korean economy fully into the era of “globalization” and making layoffs easier
for employers. Employers had been steadily chipping away at the worker gains of
the late 1980’s, and the economy was further weakening through 1996 with
accelerating bankruptcies, but this was the first head-on confrontation.
The
KCTU, firmly in the hands of the right-wingers who had defeated and displaced
the NCTU, called an immediate general strike, which was widely followed. Even
the reactionary FKTU joined in. White-collar workers joined as well, and at its
peak three million workers were on strike. The initial legislation was
withdrawn, but a virtually identical law passed in March 1997, with no reponse
from the KCTU.
But
the failure of the general strike of January 1997 was in turn eclipsed by the
devastation of the Korean economy during the Asian financial meltdown of 1997-
1998.
Beginning
in Thailand in July 1997 with the collapse of the Thai currency, the crisis rolled
through Asia in subsequent months as every country that had embraced the “free
market” and hence loosened capital controls saw a massive flight of capital and
the plummeting of its currency, with Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea being
the hardest hit. The Korean won fell 40% by November 1997, when the Kim Young
Sam government obtained a $57 billion bailout from the IMF. All four candidates
for the December 1997 presidential elections had to sign an acceptance of the
IMF agreement as a condition for disbursement. Thus Kim Dae Jong, finally
elected president of Korea after decades in the wildnerness of the democratic
opposition, had to devote his term in office to implementing the IMF’s draconian package of
layoffs, cutbacks of government services, the leveraged and deregulated foreign
buyout of Korean industries and banks, and the casualization of labor. Korean
democracy, like Korean organized labor before it, triumphed at the very moment
when the fulfillment of its earlier apparent promise became impossible.
Bankruptcies cascaded and suicides skyrocketed. The IMF initially demanded that
Korean banks lay off 50% of their personnel (the figure was later lowered to
30%) and similar numbers of civil servants. The unemployment rate tripled by
1999, and millions were thrown back into poverty.
In
this situation, Kim Dae Jong and the KCTU played their appointed roles. As
previously mentioned, Kim pulled the KCTU leadership into the February 1998
Tripartite accords, assenting to mass emergency layoffs. The KCTU rank-and-file
revolted against such abject surrender and ousted the
leadership that had signed off on the deal. There were some large-scale strikes
against layoffs in 1998, such as the Hyundai Motor Company (HMC) strike, but
they were generally defeated with KCTU cooperation.
The issue of national unification: Kaison
economic zone; SK loans; joint north-south shipyard project. Change of SK
bourgeoisie views on reunficiation. SK investment overseas: China, SE Asia, US,
Eastern Europe, Western Europe. FTA. The “peasant question”. Rural
depopulation; foreign bridges. Pyongtek. Migrant workers 500,000. MWU.
Crackdown. Anti-US demos after 2 girls killed 200?. Seoul to become “financial
hub of Asia”. Real estate market bubble; corruption; medium small construction
firms threatened. Influence of Henry Georgism. Regional integration? Asian
currency? Dok Do Islands. Anti- Japanese sentiment.
Comfort women.
June
2006 election to have industrial unions; majority wins, but companies continue
to negotiate with company unions. Worker suicides. Fines of individual workers
by companies for striking. Industrial accidents/deaths. Birth rate and aging of
population.
Class
shift in university population since the 1980’s. Northern infiltration.
Dissolution of baekgoldan. Chaebols simultaneously disliked for corruption and
recognized as champions of national economy. Lone Star episode and post-IMF
trauma. World Social Forum (Hong Kong, 2007). Prostitution, sex industry.
E-Land strike. Deportation of MWU officers. Infiltration
of KCTU by underground groups.
People:
Gibin. Joon-seok. Won Bae. Min Gyu. Hae Gwan. Gimm Gong. SNU grad students. Kim
ChangWoo, Kim Yong Kon, Sudol, Ahn (Ulsan), Baek (Ulsan), Oh sei-chull, Hwang
seon-gil, Ko Young-joo, Jeong Seong-jin, Choi Il-Bung, Park (Seung-in?), Jeong
Byungkee, HyunChul and Inah. Kim Dong-hoon, Gunna and friend, Jung and Jeeyeun.
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