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The following is the sixth in a series of excerpts from President Kim Dae-jung's recent book on DJ Welfarism, which highlights his vision of a new ideal for productive welfare in Korea. - ED.

Worker participation through trade unions is the very first step towards industrial democracy and one of the most fundamental channels of participation for laborers.

It is important to establish channels for trade unions and their workers to participate in a wide array of activities, such as production procedures, workers' welfare, distribution of benefits, and industrial safety.

To survive in this era of increasing global competition, President Kim suggested in his essay, ``The Direction of the Labor Movement in Korea'' (Sasang-Gye, 1955), that Korean companies need to develop ways to encourage cooperation between labor and management and to increase worker participation.

Companies will not be able to survive in the future if their businesses are not based on creativity and voluntary workplace involvement by their employees. In Mr. Kim's words: ``While we should always respect private ownership and individual creativity, we should reject unilateral dominance by capital and seek a situation where labor, capital and technology cooperate with each other on an equal footing. By doing so, we will enable rapid improvement of productivity and ensure fair distribution of profits to workers and technicians.''

Although more than 40 years have passed since Mr. Kim first introduced the ideas of labor participation in welfare and industrial democracy, his ideas have strong relevance today.

In particular, the term ``cooperationism,'' which he coined to suggest the direction of future labor-management relations, is worth noting even today.

Also, new labor issues, such as employment adjustment, overhauling salary scales, and continuing education are now arising.

In order to smoothly resolve these issues, employers should take the initiative of seeking ways to ensure worker participation.

To achieve this relationship, however, trust between labor and management is needed. The surest way to build this trust is to initiate worker participation.

In building trust, we need to firmly establish practices that encourage worker participation in management and capital ownership, as well as to seek structural measures to support these practices.

In particular, worker participation in capital could bring about many positive results. For employers, the employee stock ownership plan could function as a safety valve, ensuring managerial rights against unwanted merger and acquisition bids.

Employee ownership participation could also serve as a way to improve the financial performance of a company by reducing labor costs, such as wages.

For the workers, owning the company's equity would assuredly strengthen employee interest in the company and serve as an effective means to accumulate personal wealth, thus, bringing benefits to both the employers and the employees.