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By KCTU@jinbo.net

The Truth About "Social Dialogue" in Korea Under President Kim Dae Jung

It has been revealed by a lawyer from the Korean Conferedation of Trade Unions (KCTU) that one of the main reasons the government pressed new charges against KCTU president Dan Byung-ho, despite all the risks it entailed, was because he refused to bring the KCTU back into the fold of the Tripartite Commission.

The KCTU lawyer, who met with president Dan on October 6th, learned from him that the prosecutor handling his case had presented him a four-point list of demands as the condition for his release.

Apparently, the prosecutor brought Dan to his office on September 27th, two days before the government laid new charges against him and kept him in jail. He urged Dan to sign a "statement of repentance" in order to be released from prison.

That a prosecutor would demand his or her client to sign such a statement would in itself be regarded as a serious violation of human rights. But what incenses human rights groups and KCTU is the specific content of the "repentance" Dan was forced to sign if he were to be released.

The "statement of repentance" put before Dan was composed of four parts: an expression of repentance for "illegal" activities; a promise not to organize any rallies which may lead to violent clashes; a promise to restrain from waging strikes and to not organize and lead illegal strikes. The fourth and last element of the "statement of repentance" was: a promise to re-join the Tripartite Commission.

KCTU has rejected the Tripartite Commission as an ineffective and meaningless body. The government has treated it as a garbage dump where labor is forced to rummage through the ruins to pick out whatever is left after the bulldozer of "restructuring" has ploughed through employment security and workers' dignity.

In the last three years, the Korean government has developed and implemented major restructuring programs in the public sector, financial sector, corporate sector, and labor market. In all these sweeping overhauls, the government has refused to discuss its plans and programs with labor. The actual shape and direction of the IMF-induced restructuring program were inaccessible for intervention by the trade union movement.

The trade unions were invited once most of the damage was done. Unions were basically asked to come to agree to the size and extent of retrenchment of employment and dismissal of workers. For example, the government had already declared that the public sector would have to shed 30% of its employees, before the issue of public sector restructuring was even brought to the Tripartite Commission for discussion.

While the so-called dialogue in the hallowed halls of the Tripartite Commission was going on, the Kim Dae-Jung government declared that it would not release any federal funds to those government institutions which failed to complete the targeted reduction in cost and employment. The government was adamant that the collective bargaining process should not stand in the way of restructuring plans. Workers in those enterprises and institutions who had attempted to initiate a collective bargaining agreement suffered a long period of non-payment of wages, as budget outlays from the responsible ministries were held back. Only when the union gave in and kowtowed to the austerity vision of the Korean government, did the much-needed funds arrive to pay wages and finance operations.

In the private sector, where many enterprises desperately required emergency funds to ride through the liquidation crisis, the Korean government demanded that business leaders come to a mutually-beneficial agreement with labor. The agreement, however, did not contain specific elaboration of what would happen. Instead, it was only a vaguely-worded "promise" by the union to accept whatever was "required" by the company in terms of employment retrenchment and cost reduction, as determined by either the government or those banks which provided credit. Such an agreement, usually, was made up of no more than just two or three sentences. It was simply a surrender notice, leaving the fate of workers to the hands of corporate management, creditor banks, and the Kim Dae-Jung government--not to mention foreign investors and the IMF.

This was the framework for the supposed "social dialogue" that was the basis of the Tripartite Commission. It was this commission that KCTU rejected.

A prosecutor for President Kim Dae Jung's government used the threat of re-incarceration to coax the KCTU president to accede to "social dialogue," as defined by the Tripartite Commission.

It has not yet become clear whether the action of the prosecutor was made by his own initiative or directed by higher authorities. In any case, the whole idea is farcical and an affront to KCTU.

No one could ever imagine the president of KCTU signing a statement of repentance agreeing to any of the four items as demanded by the prosecutor. Clearly, the prosecutor knew this fact as well. Therefore, Dan's refusal could in no way be regarded as a serious act of breach of confidence, because his action was already expected, and he could not do otherwise. Then, why did the prosecutor go ahead with the demands?

The action of the prosecutor, despite its ludicrousness, coincides with the "formalism" of the Kim Dae-Jung government. It was a clumsy effort to obtain an excuse for reneging on the agreement the government had entered into with the Catholic mediator who made the arrangement for Dan's return to jail in early August. The prosecutor's office could now argue: "How can you let such a person off the hook when he refuses to repent for the illegal strikes he was imprisoned for and refuses to promise to not organise any more illegal strikes?"

It is no wonder that the Korean government has imprisoned 218 unionists in jail this year.