Beyond the Minjung: Movements, Politics, and Social Space on the Korean Peninsula

Welfare Politics

2011-07-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

Grand National Party (GNP) Chairman Hong Joon-pyo has embarked upon a “pro-working class journey,” making visits to the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) and the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) on July 14 his first official events since assuming the party leadership.
“There is no conservative and no progressive when it comes to policies for the working class,” said Hong during an afternoon visit to the PSPD. “The right thing to do is work together to solve North-South Korean problem, starting with working class policies.”
GNP chairman reaches out to pro-working class organizations, Hankyoreh

Over the past two years there has been quite a shift in the discourse of Korean politics, with the ascendency of welfare state discourse. Unlike the conservative discourse that framed welfare states as immoral excess and dominated Anglo-American countries from the 1980s, this discourse seems generally affirmative and has resulted in competition between parties vying with different visions for making Korea into a welfare state. Much of this talk revolves around policies such as free school lunches and lower tuition, but there is a potential here for more coherent and egalitarian political vision to shape the discussion. That the very terms of the debate are structured around welfare shows that there is weakening of conservative discourse and that, in many ways, the political left should be able to more effectively leverage the debate towards a more comprehensive social democratic vision. Unfortunately, I haven't seen much in the way of substantive policies from the DP, both parties seem to talk about welfare apart from the necessary policies needed to pursue it, such as progressive taxation. In other words, they tend to depoliticize the discussion. It will be interesting to look in more depth at some of the new organizations that have sprung up in this debate are proposing to reshape Korea's political economy. I'm going to try to post more on this, and a few other things, in the coming months.

Pictured above: proto-welfarist Robert Owen's New Lanark

The National Security Law Returns

2011-03-02T17:44:00.001-08:00

[From the Korean Democracy Foundation photo archives Flickr pool]

The National Security Law continues to haunt South Korean civil society. I heard about this case back in January but I didn't have all the details until recently. Perhaps a wider campaign is needed to overturn the NSL. Under Roh, lawmakers argued that it had become a defunct law, but since Lee Myung Bak was elected in 2008, investigations under the NSL have increased significantly.

Eight South Koreans convicted for breaching National Security Law

24 February 2011

AI Index: PRE01/082/2011

Amnesty International has condemned the conviction of eight members of the Socialist Workers League (SWL), a small association that espouses socialism. All eight men were found guilty under Article 7.1 of the National Security Law (NSL) for ‘propagating or instigating a rebellion against the State’.

Among the eight is Oh Se-chul, a professor emeritus and founding member of the SWL, who was convicted for one-and-a-half years, suspended for three years. The other seven all received sentences ranging from one to one-and-a-half years, suspended from two to three years. All of them intend to appeal the decision.

The SWL was founded in 2008 and calls on the working class to build a ‘socialist state’. The SWL has about 70 members and has been seeking to register as a political party. The organization sought to promote itself and socialism by attending various demonstrations and distributing pamphlets.

“It is hard to see how eight men distributing pamphlets can constitute a genuine threat to national security. These men have been convicted solely for exercising their right to freedom of expression and association. The conviction must be overturned,” said Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Director.

The NSL contains clauses that prohibit ‘anti-state’, ‘enemy-benefitting’ and ‘espionage’ activities but does not clearly define them. Amnesty International believes this law has been used as a form of censorship, to punish people for publishing and distributing material expressing views that oppose the positions or policies of the government.

“The NSL has long been used as a tool to silence dissent and to arbitrarily prosecute individuals who are peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and association. To prevent further human rights violations this law needs to be abolished or fundamentally reformed to bring it in line with international standards,” said Catherine Baber.

Amnesty International recognises that South Korea has serious security concerns with regard to North Korea. However, security concerns should never be used to deny people the right to exercise their human rights, in particular the right to express their views peacefully.

In 2008, the Seoul District Court twice rejected requests to issue detention warrants for several members of the SWL. The judge rejected the requests noting that the activities of the SWL represented no substantial threat to the security of the country.

In August 2009, eight members of SWL including Professor Oh, were charged for violating Article 7 of the NSL. The unsuccessful attempts in 2008 to get a detention warrant had included charges under Article 3 (forming anti-state groups) as well as Article 7 of the NSL.

Amnesty International Call for Action

2011-02-23T21:11:00.000-08:00

Here is an urgent call for action put out by Amnesty International in support of Michel Catuira, current MTU President.

URGENT ACTION
TRADE UNIONIST AT RISK OF FORCED DEPORTATION
Michel Catuira, President of the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union (MTU) in South Korea is at risk of being deported. The Korea Immigration Service has told him that he must leave the country by 7 March or he will become undocumented and subject to forcible deportation. Amnesty International believes he has been targeted for his role in the MTU.

As of 7 March 2011, Michel Catuira, a 38-year-old Filipino national and President of the MTU, will be subject to forcible deportation from South Korea. The government of South Korea refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the MTU and has staged a number of crackdowns on its leaders since it was founded in 2005.

The harassment of Michel Catuira began in July 2010. The Ministry of Employment and Labour ordered him and his employer to appear for an interview under suspicion of a false employment relationship. The Ministry did not find any prosecutable violation of labour or immigration law. However, it found that Caturia’s workplace, a shoe factory, had little business. As the main goal of the Employment Permit System (EPS) is to provide foreign labour to companies with labour shortages, the Ministry sent a memo to Michel Catuira’s employer suggesting that they file a change of workplace for him.

In November 2010, Michel Catuira was called to appear before an investigation team of the Korea Immigration Service on “suspicion of violation of the Immigration Control Act in the course of applying for a workplace transfer and with relation to actual performance of work duties at present”. They concluded that he was not working at the shoe factory, thus, the grounds for his work visa was “deceitful”, in breach of article 89.1 of the Immigration Control Act. On 10 February, the immigration authorities cancelled his visa, and on 14 February, he was told that he had until 7 March to leave South Korea.

The MTU has been very vocal during the past few years in favour of the respect, protection and promotion of the rights of migrant workers in South Korea. In particular the MTU has spoken out against restrictions placed on migrant workers’ freedom to change workplaces and against immigration raids, which have resulted in arbitrary arrests, collective expulsions and violations of law enforcement procedures, including the excessive use of force.

PLEASE WRITE IMMEDIATELY in English, Korean or your own language, urging the authorities of South Korea to:
Restore Michel Catuira’s visa status and refrain from forcibly deporting him;
Immediately stop all practices which result in obstacles or deterrents to actively participating in trade unions;
Immediately remove obstacles to participating in the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union (MTU), in particular by recognizing its status as a legal union in South Korea in line with domestic and international law and standards.

PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 07 MARCH 2011 TO:
Chief Commissioner of the Korea Immigration Service
SEOK Dong-hyun
Korea Immigration Service
1-19 Gwacheon, NC Building 8th Floor
Byeolyang-dong, Gwacheon
Gyeonggi Province 427-705
Republic of Korea
Fax: +82-2-500-9097/9059
Salutation: Dear Commissioner

Minister of Justice
LEE Kwi-nam
Ministry of Justice
Gwacheon Government Complex
88 Gwanmoon-ro, Gwacheon
Gyeonggi Province 427-720
Republic of Korea
Fax: +82-2-503-3532/7023
Email: webmaster@moj.go.kr
Salutation: Dear Minister

And copies to:
Minister of Employment and Labour
Bahk Jae-wan
Ministry of Employment and Labour
Gwacheon Government Complex
88 Gwanmoon-ro, Gwacheon
Gyeonggi Province 427-718
Republic of Korea
Fax: +82-2-503-6623
Email: molab506@moel.go.kr
Also send copies to diplomatic representatives accredited to your country. Check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date.

The Migrant Trade Union's latest struggle

2010-12-17T22:34:00.000-08:00

This pressure has increased recently in the wake of activities MTU carried out to protest the death of a Vietnamese migrant worker who fell from a second story window in the course of an immigration raid. On November 5, MTU and other organizations held a press conference concerning the incident in front of the Seoul Immigration Office, after which participants made a protest visit to the immigration authorities to ask them to take responsibility for the death. President Catuira participated in these activities. Shorty after, on November 23, President Catuira received a summons from the Immigration Service telling him he must appear before the Immigration Service’s investigation team before December 3 to be investigated based on “suspicion of violations of the Immigration Control Law in the course of applying for a workplace transfer and with relation to actual performance of work duties at present.” Inquiry by a lawyer working with MTU has revealed that the investigation team is also planning to raise suspicions that President Catuira is conducting political activities of a nature prohibited under immigration law. If the investigation team finds against President Catuira, he will lose his visa and become immediately deportable.

Via the Migrant Trade Union's website, I've noticed that the immigration authorities are now targeting its president, Michel Catuira, by attempting to get his employment contract terminated for engaging in 'political activities.' You can read the MTU's recent letters and appeals to the UN and ITUC (quoted above) for more background on the case and on the persistent violation of labour and human rights that the MTU fought so valiently against since it was founded almost 10 years ago. I might add that even though the Seoul High Court declared back in 2007 that the government must recognize the MTU, but this has still not happened. And in this case the lack of legal recognition of the MTU is one among many important factors. Sad how there is so much energy put into monitoring and repressing politicized migrants, and little into fixing the immigration system so that senseless tragedies, like the death of Trinh Cong Quan, mentioned above, continue to this day.

An Urban Theory of Korean Democratization?

2010-12-12T22:37:00.001-08:00

The struggle of 2008 is similar to the struggle of 1980, in the point that it demanded the dignity of life. But it is similar to the struggle of 1987, in the point that it was led by the community of production and living [note: I think JJH means 'of the 'lifeworld'' or for 'freedom in everyday life' here]. However, the community of production, which emerged politically in 2008, was an information-based, cognitive, and non-material community based on the metropolis, rather than the factory which was based on material activities . In this context, the struggle of 2008 is a new type of struggle originating from circumstances where financial, natural and social lives overlap with communal production.
In this struggle, the conflict between the central intelligence powers, which placed combat police and SWAT teams at the head, and the constituent power, organized by collective multitude intelligence sources, appeared radically in some ways, and was quite humorous. The constituent power mocked the ‘Myungbak Fortress’, singing the song of ‘Article 1 of the Constitution’ which defined that ‘All power of Korea come from the people’.... Unlike guns in 1980 and Molotov cocktails in 1987, words (language) circulated through various information mechanisms, becoming the tools for accessing the multitude...

I'm excited to see that Joe Jeong Hwan has put a list of his writings that have been translated into foreign languages. Included is a synopsis of his book, The Common City, which I've discussed on this blog in the past. In the synopsis, you can see that what Joe seems to be providing is something of an urban theory of the democratic activism, or, in Negrian terms, of the multitude as a spatialized, urban phenomenon that is informed by changes in the urbanization of capital -- from import to export-based industrialization and the development of factory districts, to the knowledge economy policies of Roh Moo Hyun and the capital city-centric mega-development policies of the current conservative regime. These movements of the multitude for greater democratization are conceived as reactions against capital's orderings of everyday urban life, reactions which utilize the very skills and capacities that have been produced through capitalist development in order to posit an alternative use of commonality, or common potential. Exciting stuff, unfortunately, Joe's works and that of other cognate thinkers such as the Suyu group, seems to get passed over by urban studies and critical geography as there is a lack of good translations of their work and because it is produced at a distance from established university disciplines, which are, to a large part, still rather conservative in orientation at a number of Korean universities with the exception of innovate programs at school like Sungkonghoe, KNUA, etc... Anyways, hoping that translations like these continue to appear.

Chun Tae Il, 40 years later

2010-10-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

One thing I really respect about key currents within the Korean labour movement is their support for migrant and irregular workers. So, for example, the 40th anniversary of Chun Tae Il's death (an act which catalysed the democratic trade union movement) includes a discussion by labour activists past and present, including activists from the Migrant Trade Union. This broadens the history of the democracy movement to include workers in the present moment. Even if they are not national citizens or workers in core firms, they get to be included in the history of democratic struggle.

The focus on the Chun Tae Il era also brings us back to the labour history of the 1970s, where it was not the blue-collar men leading the movement, but women workers and labour activists, like Chun Tae Il's mother and sister, in the garment industry. This kind of historical scrutiny can help the movement think more about how the present and the past intersect, revealing some of the neglected spaces of the present labour movement. This is a necessary exercise as the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions seems to be becoming more aligned around the interests of regular workers at large firms. Furthermore, events such as these connect politicians that articulate their legacy in relation to Minjung martyrs like Chun Tae Il to current labour and social movement struggles like that of migrant workers, the urban poor, and other struggles for diversity and equality. You can see from the graphics of next week's Chun Tae Il events and from the diverse speakers' list (if you can read Korean) that commemorate events such as these are as much about the present as they are about that past. This should alert us to a continued push for more democratization as well as the sense that these different struggles in the present should still be considered as vital parts of a comprehensive social movement; parts that need to be articulated together, rather than left to fragmentation. The difference here is between a notion of civil society as an ensemble of private actors, separately pursuing personal and sectoral interests, versus a notion of civil society as a comprehensive, social movement, which is more in keeping with the notion of civil society embraced by the groups and organization that emerged from the Korean Democracy Movement.

[UPDATE] The Hankyoreh has run a few stories on the 40th anniversary here, here, and here.

Political Space and the Korean Thermidor

2010-08-29T20:08:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been making short presentations based on a long essay I wrote called A Korean Thermidor? Essentially, I've been drawing out different parts of the argument, trying to understand how we might interpret conservative reaction in South Korea in an expansive conceptual and empirical sense. Anyways, the essay itself probably won't come out for a long time, due to the slow pace of academic publishing, but in the meantime here is the rough script I used for my last presentation, part of the panel Critical Geographical Readings on Post-Colonial Korea at this year's Kyujanggak Korean Studies Symposium, with diagrams! Further, it is a timely topic given the continued targeting of reformers, even centrist ones, by the Korean right, who seem to embrace the same analytical obfuscations that the American right uphold and use to obscure any Keynesian, social democratic, or socialist criticism or policy as a chimera, a fictional monster, rather than acknowledging these competing positions for what they are: rational prescriptions for social equality, political space, and economic reform.

On Political Space: Democratization and the Korean Thermidor

My presentation today has developed accidentally. My doctoral work was concerned with understanding economic reform in South Korea from the perspective of how it was influenced by the nexus between the state and social movements that came out of the democracy movement. I was very critical of many of the coordination problems between reform groups as well as the role of nationalism and neoliberalism amongst some reformers. However, since the election of Lee Myung Bak this very space has been targeted by the state, with the consequence that, for the last few years I’ve been trying to keep track of the many changes to the policies of the reform government and the way in which the political spaces of the reform bloc have been target by conservative forces.

Pursuing this line of inquiry has caused me to look for theories that can better explain the politics of reaction. This has led me to the work of Alain Badiou and others. Badiou’s understanding of politics, political sequences, and reactions against them (what he calls thermidorian politics), I think, can provide some provocative insights into geographical inquiry. However, I claim, they need to be anchored to an expansive conception of political space. So what I am going to do here is to attempt to explain a little bit about what this notion of political space might look like and discuss it in light of Badiou’s notion of the thermidor and the politics of conservative reaction in South Kore – which, I argue, is a reaction aimed at making the sense of popular agency associated with democratization illegible; the sources of which exist both inside and outside the reform bloc itself.

I’ll start them by reviewing some of the politics of reaction before jumping into the theoretical interpretation. Since the election of Lee Myung Bak there has been a severing of the institutional nexus between the Korean state and reform-oriented civil society that was established by the Korean democracy movement and reform governments of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun (from roughly late 1997- early 2008). The Ministry of Gender Equality, which expanded under the reform period, has lost most of its budget and mandate; the National Human Rights Commission has been restructured and its powers decreased; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, largely defunded. Parachute appointments and political dismissals have taken place across arts and culture as well as state broadcasters and communications commissions. The National Security Law has been used to intimidate social movements for reunification and social equality, and state funding for NGOs has been denied to any NGO taking part in “illegal” public demonstrations, meaning the candlelight demonstrations in 2008: over 1842 social and civic organizations in this category, from Women’s help lines to economic policy NGOs.

This reaction has been articulated as an attempt to cleanse the state of the ‘leftist’ legacy of reform governments. The term ‘leftist’ here is obscure. The conservative political bloc around Lee Myung Bak have created a chimera (or fictional monster) of what they see as the Korean liberal-left: the reform bloc that emerged from the democracy movement. This monster considers both reunification and neoliberal reform as excesses of left-nationalism. I want to argue that this material and symbolic obstruction of democratic politics constitutes an example of what Alain Badiou has called Thermidorean politics: that is, a determined effort to end or obstruct a political sequence by obscuring it or making its demands, broad principles, or historical trajectory illegible, preventing lessons from being abstracted from it, good or bad. As Badiou states,

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgement about it.
~Alain Badiou, The Courage of the Present. Le Monde. February 2010

So, in Badiou’s understanding, there is something to be learned from a hard analysis of political sequences, of both right and left, and that the legibility of their political demands is part of political struggle.

Historically, the Thermidor denotes the reaction against the radical phase of Jacobin rule during the French Revolution. This reaction, which was actually carried out by former Jacobites themselves, was aimed at diluting, through force and through rendering illegible, many of the egalitarian demands of the Jacobite and popular movements. This reaction was based on transforming revolutionary ‘virtue’ to loyalty to the state, paving the way for more hierarchical social divisions to be implemented. Badiou calls this the statification of the French revolution. Badiou is not necessarily endorsing the revolutionary violence of the Jacobin revolution, here; rather, he argues that politics always involves a disruption of social space and that it is important to learn from the demands and prescriptions the inform this disruption. The notion of the thermidor then, is an generic attempt to understand moments in which popular ‘virtue’ become transformed from a sense of radical popular participation to a more confined sense of patriotic loyalty.

I would say that a geographical conception of political space needs to include some of the temporal aspects of politics that we see here in the concept of the Thermidor. However, in geography, the term political space is more often used as a short-hand for the state, or territorial politics than it is for the kind of disruptive and strategic challenge to social space that one finds in popular social movements such as the Korean democracy movement. While Lefebvre, whose work is foundational for much of critical geography, argued that “Space is political” – I quote: “Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics; it has always been political and strategic,” he claims – in political geography lefebvre’s understanding of the political here is often simply used to connote state space. However, Lefebvre’s interest in popular forms of political agency in everyday life and everyday space, so I think a more expansive definition is necessary.

This critique of political geography is also in keeping, also, with calls for a more flexible understanding of political society in East Asia. Kuan-Hsing Chen (Civil Society and Min-Jian), for example, argued in a recent essay in Cultural Studies that the distinction between state and civil society is too simplistic. He sees the Gramscian notion of bloc politics as an improvement, but argues that the notion of ‘blocs’ can lose site of other social struggles that exist independently of state power or are not co-articulated with a hegemonic bloc. In the East Asian context, Chen thus speaks of an additional sphere of min-jian or people’s sphere as the space of political society, which is both articulated with and autonomous from hegemonic politics [see diagram]. One sees a similar logic in the work of Cho Hee Yeon and other Korean scholars interested in conceptualizing both everyday social regimentation and general state-society relations. I support this interpretation, but I think a problem here is that one can fall a little too easily into a binary contrast between the ‘people’s sphere’ and the sphere of the state and civil society, so a more general definition of political space is necessary.

The Chinese New Left intellectual Wang Hui, provides a clearer definition of the political as concerning ‘power and interest’ and ‘active subjectivity and human agency.’ One can easily spatialize this definition to talk about spaces of power and interest, and spaces of human agency and active subjectivity. To understand a political sequence as a spatial process involves an effort to think of the spatial practices whereby spaces become political --that is, to think how particular spaces are brought into relations of power and interest or are challenged and reconfigured by practices of human agency and active subjectivity. It is through a dialectical tension between both senses here – a tension that is realized in relations of conflict, coordination, mobilization, resistance, representation -- that space becomes political.

The temporal aspect, the focus on sequences of politics, is the element that I think geographers can best learn from – as long, I suppose, as historians don’t object to such annexation of time. So, in the remainder of my presentation I’m going to be focusing on the temporal aspects of Badiou’s understanding of political sequences. For Badiou, a political sequence emerges from an event that disrupts a social situation in terms of its ordering of space. Badiou regards politics as a procedure suited to understanding the latent possibilities of an event: and a political sequence is thus a series of attempts to understand the event and to reshape the political situation based on this understanding. In other words, for Badiou events are constitutive of political subjectivity. A key virtue of politics, then, is fidelity to the logical consequences of an event. In Badiou’s terminology, fidelity is a relation that binds a subject to an event, and thus to other subjects. It is a virtue that is all too easily corrupted.

While Badiou’s personal fidelity may be to understanding the ‘postevental’ consequences of the event of 1968, for the Korean left it is the events of 1980s that constitutes their current practice. The spaces they disrupted were none other than the state’s developmentalist policies and the conservative hegemony of the old regime. It was the spaces of exportist industrialization, Cold War anticommunism, and militarized masculinity that were temporarily broken. In the events of the 1980s, a feeling of rupture was experienced, one that opened politics, and pointed to the possible. Democratic events such as May 68, or the June Uprising reveal the gerneric potential for political participation. They expand prevailing conceptions of political space: thus, their potential lies in a truth or a feeling of generic equality – the sense that a wide amount of people have the potential to participate in politics. It is this sense of equality that politics, in the Badiouvian sense, interrogates and uses to create new political spaces or challenge existing ones. In this sense, politics, for Badiou, is always based on the (eternal) truth of an event (all have a capacity to participate), and a procedure based on verifying how it might be materialized in the current situation. One can see similar themes in recent work by Korean intellectuals such as Joe Jeong Hwan who looks at the way in which new senses of commonality are created in events such as the Kwangju Uprising and the Candlelight protests of 2008.

This is relatively new terrain for critical geography, but similar understandings of political space have applied by spatial scholars in other disciplines. For example, Kristen Ross (2002) has dealt at length with the effects of events such as mass uprisings on social space. She describes how events such as uprisings and general strikes allow, “if only for an instant, the exploration of other possible lives, a vast unexplored area of possibility.” Ross’s understanding of politics here is not simply confined to actually-exisiting democratic processes but is an attempt to show how politics is constituted by a rupture or a gap within the power to rule. This resonates with the work of both Badiou but especially Jacques Rancierre who argues that politics does “not simply presuppose the rupture of the 'normal' distribution of positions between the one who exercises power and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions 'proper' to such classifications” (Rancierre 2001 Thesis 3). For Ranciere, this notion of politics is specifically opposed to what he calls the police. “The police is a 'partition of the sensible' [le partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement” [thesis 7, Rancierre 2001], whereas democratics politics is a process of naming this void and challenging its exclusion.Thus democracy for these scholars is a dialectical sequence not only of governance but also of resistance to forms of rule that partition social space into set orders – which is similar to my defintion of political space above.

The last point I’d like to make is that this partition of the political space, to which democratic politics is constituted, is a feature both internal and external to political sequences undertaken by social movements. The failure of social cooperation policies under DJ and Roh Moo Hyun, as well as a number of their neoliberal policies could be regarded as part of the thermidor in that they also create partitions in political space. The Thermidor is also a major strategic problem for the internal coordination of reform forces.

I’d like to conclude then by advocating for continued engagement between critical geography and political events in South Korea such as the 1987 protests. These are themes that were of interest to an earlier generation of Korean studies scholars like Nancy Abelmann and Kenneth Wells, and, hopefully, with the expansive notion of political space that I’ve articulated here, I think there is room for a new round of critical work that interprets the democratic events and their effects on the current conjuncture.

Copyleft, Jamie Doucette 2010

In Seoul

2010-08-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

I'll be making a short presentation at this event on Thursday. I think it is open to the public.

The Third Kyujanggak International Symposium

Date 27-28 August, 2010
Venue Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, Seoul National University and
Sinyang Humanities Hall

Session 1 (14:00 - 17:00) Sinyang Hall Seminar Room

Chair Park Bae Kyun

Topic: Critical Geographical Readings on Post-Colonial Korea

1. The Chaebol and the Development State: Cold War Geo-Political Economy and the Disciplining of Korean Capital
Jim Glassman (UBC)/Choi young Jin(SNU)
2. Contested identities in post colonial Incheon City
Ryu je hun (Korea National University of Education)
3. Beyond the Postcolonial National: Migrant Workers in Urban Public Spaces of Seoul
Kim Young Hyun (Ohio University)
4. A Korean Thermidor? Political Space and Democratization in South Korea
Jamie Doucette (UBC)
5. Why has Korean regionalism been criticized as premodern?
Kim Dong Wan (University of Seoul)

Labour Geography

2010-08-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

I have a chapter in this new book on labour geography. I haven't seen the final edit yet, but it is now published. My chapter is a theoretical one about reconciling geographical theories of the 'spatial fix' (solutions to problems of overaccumulation) and Gramscian/poststructural approaches to labour activism sensitive to the contingency of political power relations. I ground this in a discussion of the failure of social partnership policies in South Korea. Here is some info on the book:

Missing Links in Labour Geography

Addressing a number of 'missing links' in the analysis of labour and its geographies, this volume examines how theoretical perspectives on both labour in general and the organizations of the labour movement in particular can be refined and redefined. Issues of agency, power and collective mobilizations are examined and illustrated via a wide range of case studies from the 'global north' and 'global south' in order to develop a better and fuller appreciation of labour market processes in developed and developing countries.

Contents: Part I Introduction: Re-engaging with agency in labour geography, Ann Cecilie Bergene, Sylvi B. Endresen and Hege Merete Knutsen; Labour geography: where have we been, where should we go?, Andrew Herod; Re-embedding the agency of labour, Neil M. Coe and David C. Jordhus-Lier. Part II The Agency of Unions: The entangled geographies of trans-national labour solidarity, Andy Cumbers and Paul Routledge; Exploring the grassroots' perspective on labour internationalisms, Rebecca Ryland; Navigating a chaotic consciousness in the trade union movement, Ann Cecilie Bergene; Schumpeterian unionism and 'high road' dreams in Toronto's hospitality sector, Steven Tufts; Trade unions as learning organizations: the challenge of attracting temporary staff, Dorit Meyer and Martina Fuchs; Union power and the formal-informal divide, Gunilla Andrae and Björn Beckman. Part III Politics of Labour: Between revolutionary rhetoric and class compromise: trade unions and the state, Herbert Jauch and Ann Cecilie Bergene; The constitutive inside: contingency, hegemony and labour's spatial fix, Jamie Doucette; Theoretical approaches to changing labour regimes in transition economies, Hege Merete Knutsen and Eva Hansson; Between coercion and consent: understanding post-apartheid workplace regimes, Ola Anders Magnusson, Hege Merete Knutsen and Sylvi B. Endresen. Part IV Labour and Strategies of Capital: Erosion from above, erosion from below: labour, value chain relegation and manufacturing sustainability, Michael Taylor and John Bryson; Globalization and the reworking of labour market segmentation in the Philippines, Niels Beerepoot; 'We order 20 bodies': labour hire and alienation, Sylvi B. Endresen. Part V Conclusion: Approaches to the social and spatial agency of labour, Ann Cecilie Bergene, Sylvi B. Endresen and Hege Merete Knutsen; Index.

'An energetic and creative intellectual project, labour geography has repeatedly broken new ground. This lively collection features many of the project’s new voices, pushing the boundaries again, and critically revisiting basic questions of agency, power and politics in sites from North to South.'
Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Canada

The Chaebol and Uneven Development

2010-07-17T11:44:00.000-07:00

From Hankyoreh 21 (the Hankyoreh's biweekly? magazine), there are two articles on the uneven effects of the financial crisis on Korean firms. The large Chaebol, such as Samsung and Hyundai, it seems, are doing very well, with high profit margins and revenue growth. The small and mid-size subcontractors that supply them are not. This is not necessarily a new thing. Korea has myriad levels of subcontracting firms, and most of this (I once heard that it was up to 80% of their production, but there is no official number that I know of) is subordinated to supplying the chaebol. So it is no wonder that the big firms are able to keep them in a subordinate relationship. As the second article in the series points out, "small and medium-sized businesses account for 99 percent of all companies and 88 percent of total employment, but [have a profit margin of just] 2 percent of profits in subcontractor deals with major companies." I would add that within this subcontracting system there are also many companies that are part owned by the chaebol, which creates a form of disguised subcontracting: ie, firms subcontracting to themselves to get around unions, taxes, and other regulations. The irregular workers' strike aimed at POSCO back in 2006 was an example of a strike against this form of subcontracting.

When I was doing my research back in 2006/2007 I interviewed a number of reformers connected to the Roh regime and to economic reform groups about the chaebol. While a number of them criticize the chaebol for dominating the economy and want to promote small and mid-size businesses (the current prime minister Chung Un-Chan once compared the chaebol are like old dinosaurs), the fact that most of these small firms are primarily oriented toward supplying the chaebol raises a problem. There was no coherent solution to deal with this issue at the time and reformers seemed divided between shareholder value reform (to break up family-control over affiliate firms), industrial policy, taxation reform, and strategic asset management of the kind done by the Hasun fund (a kind of nationalist ethical fund). I guess the idea here was that by breaking up the Chaebol or using industrial policy and state intervention the state could create a more equitable relation across industry (or, in the case of more progressive taxation, siphon off some of that profit and redistribute it). Unfortunately, no coherent plan emerged (chapters 3 and 4 of my dissertation and my recent Journal of Contemporary Asia piece deal with the problem to some extent, both are linked here).

I would say that another way that reform forces such as the labour movement have tried to deal with the Chaebol is through labour struggle around wage rates and working conditions in subcontracting firms. Here there has been mixed progress through both industrial unionism and through activist campaigns targeting the labour standards at chaebol affiliated firms. On the latter note, the Hankyoreh has a profile of Lee Jong Ran, an activist fighting for bereaved victims of occupational illness at Samsung's semiconductor plants.

On an unrelated note, I've always liked the format that bookforum's omnivore blog uses to post links of stuff they've been reading under a common theme. So, I'm going to start doing the same.

Into the breach

2010-06-24T10:37:00.001-07:00

For the 60th anniversary of the Korean war, the Hankyoreh has published some recently discovered photographs by Lim In-sik. You can view them here and here. I'm not normally one to publish much on this period, since Matt does such a good job at it and my interests are more contemporary. But the picture above, of the floating bridge across the Han really struck me, so I'd thought I'd share.

The legacy of the Korean war, especially the afterlife of cold war anti-communism and its chilling effects on domestic politics is something I've been writing about a little more these days (more on that later). Particularly, the way that a Chimera of communism has been used to condone crimes against South Koreans. On that note, there is a moving piece also in the Hankyoreh about Kim Gwang-Ho, president of the National Korean War Surviving Family Members' Association. Kim's father and grandfather were victims of state violence. His grandfather, a nationalist from the March 1st movement, executed by rightist youth during the Korean war; his father, a wealthy citizen who, in 1960, reburied victims of rightist massacres during the war, only to incur decades of torture and harassment.

Grim reading. Part of the rhetoric of the story reminds one of the red baiting rhetoric employed by members of the conservative government:

When Kim’s father asked the prosecutor, “What crime is it to bury my father’s remains?” the prosecutor reportedly replied, “It is a crime to bury Reds.” In January 1962, Kim’s father was sentenced to seven years in prison by the revolutionary court, and he was released two years and seven months later.

After that, Kim’s family began to collapse. The released father, perhaps because of the aftereffects of torture, was unable to do difficult work. Kim and most of his seven brothers and sisters were unable to attend high school. One older sister was divorced for being from a “Red family.” The pain continued for another decade afterwards. Whenever any espionage incident took place, large or small, Kim’s father was dragged off and returned half-dead.

“We get a call from some place at the market merchants’ association where we worked,” Kim recalled. “They say, ‘He’s out.’ So the whole family takes a taxi from Busan’s Oncheonjang to Nampo-dong and races over. We find our father sprawled out somewhere in the harbor, wrapped in a straw mat. We went through that more than twenty times.”

Though times have changed, the survival of this kind of political discourse is still a great problem. I think it is, however, largely ineffective these days, but it still does damage. Politicized prosecutions, national security law investigations against dissidents, and a general fear mongering in politics are how it is manifested. And yet, this doesn't seem to win elections and only seems to placate that frenzied fragment of the old right that valorize the Park Chung Hee regime. Though, it should be mentioned that the new right tries to label the economic policies of the liberal left and even shareholder value reformers (neoliberal corporate governance reformers, in other words) as 'red' or 'leftist' policy in a similar attempt to obscure and make a monster out of public criticism. And, in my mind, this is a more serious afterlife of a statist nationalism antagonistic toward civil society. Even more saddening when you hear comments like "which country are you from?" from the supposedly moderate prime minister, in response to doubts raised about the recent Cheonan sinking.

This is not to say that one cannot criticize NGOs like any other interest groups according to the logic of their claims, but to make their exercise of speech itself the problem, and to stigmatize and threaten them with the national security law, returns civil society to a politics of voluntary subordination to the national state, a silencing of dissent, and an erasure of civil rights. It also overstates rational risks to national security by attempting to create, since none of this has been successful at a popular level, an inflated sense of internal and external risk. Unfortunately, even though it doesn't seem to sway public opinion -- who, let's face it, care more about the World Cup at the moment than North Korea -- this kind of politics perpetuates political and economic structures badly in need of further democratic reform. Especially at the level of the prosecution, corporate governance, labour relations, urban development, and inter-Korean engagement.

Links, Links, Links

2010-06-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

I've finally gotten around to updating, well, really just fixing, the links on the left side of this blog. There were a lot of sites that had expired in the years since I began the blog. So, an update was overdue. I've also inserted a few more links that really needed to be included. However, there are still a number of blogs, organizations, and whatnot that would complement the site. So if you have any suggestions, please comment!

Freeters, Migrants, Samsung

2010-05-24T22:14:00.000-07:00

As I get back to posting on a more regular basis, I'm going to make a few large summaries of issues that I haven't followed for a while. So, starting with contemporary labour issues, here is a string of links:

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) has dismissed 134 public school teachers for being indicted, along with other civil servants, by prosecutors on charges that included membership in the minor opposition Democratic Labor Party (DLP). Korean teachers cannot join political parties. South Korea has not ratified ILO Convention 87, on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise, or ILO Convention 98, on the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining. This has led to calls by the ILO for Korea to improve labour standards.

The government is expanding its crackdown on undocumented migrant workers in advance of November's G20 summit. You can read more on the recent history of the migrant movement here.

Samsung has come under a lot of criticism lately not only for possible collusion with government prosecutors but also because of the high incidence of cancer among its workers. Activists protesting the death of another young Samsung worker were recently arrested. Stop Samsung has more on the high rate of blood cancer among young Samsung workers.

One out of 10 Korean workers was found to be paid less than the legal minimum wage, according to a recent survey. South Korea's gender wage gap was also found to be the highest in the OECD, as was the number of industrial accidents (though there may be some issues of reporting standards here).

The KWWA has been protesting the low wages that 'interns' receive, as has a newly formed Youth Union based on the Japanese Freeter movement (picture). That's all for now.

The politics of minority

2010-05-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

Yet more Korean social thought. The Politics of Minority (English summary) was the first of Suyu Noma's Bookzines and contains some interesting articles. It is from 2007/2008 and has elements of a postdevelopment critique of Korean progressive thought. Remember that this was the time when Sonjinhwa (joining the advanced countries) ideology was gaining popularity, and Roh's regime had deepened its neoliberal turn. The editors attack what they see as a stage-ist theory of democracy and development that subordinates human and other forms of life to market and state forces, highlighting the struggles of migrant workers, disabled citizens, and the diverse ecology of Saemangum, among other 'minorities.' They have published a few other issues since then, and I'm curious if they've yet to expand their notions of alter-revolution and commune-ism to forms of economic practice. It seems to be one of the loopholes of their broader oeuvre: while they have reimagined political democracy, I've not seen much from them on economic democracy. I think they would embrace a position similar to JK Gibson-Graham, judging from some of their political commitments and the structure of their commune or 'research machine' as they call it.

Korean financialization

2010-05-06T11:37:00.001-07:00

I noticed via Wallflower that there is a new book out called, roughly, 20 years of financial (portfolio development) rage in Korea. I think the title of WF's post, 20대 꼬붕론 , means 20-year bender, but I'm not sure (translation anyone?). It would be interesting to find out what the perspective of the book is, i.e. how critical of the process of financialization it is.

On a related topic, I got a book a last year called, Korean Society and Strategies for Rebuilding the Left (also a rough translation), which features interviews with Ha Joon Chang and essays on finance by a number of the intellectuals associated with Tae-an Yeondae (the Alternatives Network), some of whom have joined some of the sessions I've organized in the past on financialization, neoliberalism and (formerly) developmental states.

Some other recent writing on finance would also include Jeong Seong Jin's essay: The Korean Developmental State: From Dirigisme to Neoliberalism. I make similar arguments but with a bit of different, perhaps more relational, perspective, in my dissertation. I have a few chapters there about financial policy and debates about financial restructuring among the Korean liberal left. I'm interested in updating this material so it is always interesting to see new material coming out.

The Common City

2010-05-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

While updating some of my links and writing the last post, I noticed that Jo Jeong Hwan has a new book out called The Common City (you can buy it here). Jo Jeong Hwan's thought is similar to autonomia, and this book seems to be about popular events in urban space such as the Kwangju Uprising and more recently the Candlelight Protests of 2008. This book is probably of particular interest to critical geography and urban studies; however, it is interesting to note that those disciplines themselves, in Korea at least, do not produce texts like these. It seems that it is the more independent writers, with only very loose academic affiliations (in various informal 'institutes' or 연구소) that seem to write this stuff.

Korean Poststructuralism Pt. 2

2010-05-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

While reading blogs by Korean academics recently -- I'm trying to find how certain debates on development, modernity, and civil society have played out in recent years -- I stumbled across Lee Taek Kwang's blog. He seems to write about the history of critical social thought, and, as an addition to my earlier entry on Korean poststructuralism, I'll repost a CFP he has written for a special issue on Deleuze and the non-West.

CFP Special Issue of Deleuze Studies

Deleuze and the Non-West edited by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Is Deleuze a Western philosopher? This question seems to raise a problem that Deleuze studies should properly deal with. If Deleuzian thought belongs to the tradition of western philosophy, in what sense does the non-West regard Deleuze as a philosopher? Philosophy is always related to knowledge which does not privilege understanding. Philosophy is equal anywhere on earth. Since Descartes’ “discovery” that the non-West could think, western philosophy could no longer ignore the presence of the non-West, a philosophical otherness in reality. If philosophy argues the idea of truth, what it needs is to persuade its other. Deleuze recognized the problem of the non-West and suggested a solution with the concept of “geophilosophy.” In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze , along with Guattari, uses this term for a philosophy of the earth. For Deleuze, thinking is not a matter of the dialectic between subject and object, but rather “the relationship of territory and the earth.” The territory-earth relationship creates the absolute plane of immanence, and Deleuze argues that Greeks invented the plane of immanence for Western philosophy. In this way, we can “speak of Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, or Islamic ‘philosophy’ … to the extent that thinking takes place on a plane of immanence that can be populated by figures as much as by concepts.” According to Deleuze, the plane of immanence is pre-philosophical, in the sense that “it becomes philosophical only through the effect of the concept.” The philosophical is always related to the non-philosophical. This means that philosophy has no internal necessity – Western philosophy is a miracle because it had accidentally encountered the territory of Greece. Therefore, it is not unusual to relate Deleuze with the non-West or place Deleuze in the non-West; rather the very Deleuzian way to speak of Deleuzian philosophy is in relation to the non-Deleuzian. With the above perspective, the special edition of Deleuze Studies seeks papers on Deleuze and the non-West.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

-. The non-Western plane of immanence
-. The non-Western reception of Deleuze
-. Globalisation and Deleuzian Politics in Asia
-. Deleuze as a philosopher of non-Western ethics
-. The translation of Deleuze into non-Western languages
-. Geophilosophical studies of Deleuze
-. Deleuzian concepts and non-Western philosophy

If you would like to contribute to this special issue of Deleuze Studies please contact the issue editor Alex Taek-Gwang The deadline for all submissions is March 2011.

Korea news feed

2010-04-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

Back when I was doing this blog more frequently I got into a habit of reposting news stories. Since I don't have time to get into that kind of blogging any more what I've done is put up an rss feed from my delicious account for anything that I categorize as Korea. It is on the right hand sidebar. Though I let my blogging slag over the last year, I've kept my delicious account up to date, so there are lots of resources there for people who are looking. In addition, there is the labourstart Korea feed just below the delicious one, so that will continue to be of interest to those reading up on Korean labour issues.

A Korean Thermidor?

2010-04-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

The following is the text of a short 20 minute presentation I had read for me at the recent American Association of Geographers conference during a session entitled Postcolonial Korea: Conjunctures and Critical Geographies. I will turn it into something longer and more substantive eventually. In the meantime, enjoy.

A Korean Thermidor?

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.

Alain Badiou, The Courage of the Present, Le Monde, 13 February 2010.

I.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the significance of the current neoconservative regime of Lee Myung Bak in relation to the political sequence of democratic reform undertaken by the Korean democracy movement over the last 20 years. In other words, what does the return of conservative rule mean for Korea’s liberal-left (or reform bloc as I prefer to call it) and their efforts to introduce greater transparency, participation, liberty, and equality into the Korean society and political economy? Using Alain Badiou’s notion of Thermidorean politics, I am interested in a reading of the current moment as a corruption; a corruption that seeks to make the political sequence of democratic reform illegible.[i] For Badiou, “a Thermidorean is essentially politically corrupt – in other words, he exploits the precariousness of political convictions” (130). The Thermidorean revises and re-interprets events, changes their meaning, enlists them to the service of another political project: a political project that is, essentially, the ending of the sequence begun by previous events. It is a containment exercise in which political subjectivity, Badiou remarks, “is referred back to order, rather than to the possibility about that which is latent in a situation, under some maxim or other. This counter-revolutionary swing could be called the statification of political consciousness (132).” For Badiou, statification means a “termination of a politics,” and a coupling between the State and established interests, and this coupling certifies that emancipatory political prescriptions are absent from now on (133).

II.

Since the election of Lee Myung Bak there has been a severing of the institutional nexus between the Korean state and reform-oriented civil society that was established by the Korean democracy movement. The effect here is to limit political space in which criticism of the regime is made and democratic demands articulated. I use the term political space here in two senses: to denote a nexus between state and civil society, and a space of representation in which the exclusions of the regime are voiced.[ii] It is these spaces and the sequences that made them legible that the current regime is focused on making illegible.

To give a short taste of this reaction as it currently stands: the Ministry of Gender Equality, which expanded under the reform period, has lost most of its budget and mandate; the National Human Rights Commission has been restructured and its powers decreased; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission defunded. Parachute appointments and political dismissals have taken place across arts and culture (from the Korean National University for the Arts and independent media organizations (Media Act and Indie Space) to state broadcasters and communications commissions). These changes have occurred even in relatively obscure state institutions like the Korean Institute of Finance and Korea Labour Institute, where even moderate Keynesians have been flushed out. The National Security Law has been used to investigate social movements for reunification and social equality.

History textbooks have been ordered rewritten to clear up “inaccuracies” about the past, especially those that conceptualize modern Korean history as a struggle for national independence. The New Right, who are a curious assemblage of former left-nationalists-cum-statist-politicians-and-economic-libertarians, regards this interpretation as an excessive demand of the “pro-North Left.” They argue that it is wrong to criticize Japan and the US because, in their opinion, without the colonial and post-colonial interventions of these countries Korea would have never developed. The New Right even advocate for an alternative dating of the foundation of the republic, to distance the foundation of the current South Korean state from the peninsula-wide demands of the independence movement. While criticizing the excesses of the left’s ignorance of “the achievements of South Korea in their insistence of first achieving peaceful coexistence,” the New Right praises dictator Park Chung Hee for his contributions to democracy.

Beyond the state apparatus, the majority of state funding for NGOs has dried up and funding has been denied to any NGO supporting “illegal” public demonstrations. Using this criteria, the police have included 1842 social and civic organizations in the latter category, from Women’s help lines to economic policy NGOs, most of whom participated in the candlelight demonstrations against Lee Myung Bak’s conservative policies during the summer of 2008. Meanwhile funding has been diverted to conservative civil society groups belonging to rightist movements (such as anti-communist veterans organizations) which have in the past attacked liberal opposition, and destroyed the alter set up to honour former President Roh Moo Hyun following his death last summer.[iii] These conservative forces paint even the neoliberal policies of the reform governments, such as equity rules and limits on family control within the Chaebol, as “leftist” policy.

What is interesting about this reaction is that it is aimed as painting the whole sequence of democratic struggle from the 1970s and 1980s onward to the liberal-democratic reform governments from 1997-2007 as ‘pro-North leftist.’ This serves to obscure the full set of political relations within this sequence of democratic politics, including the steps taken by reform governments to re-segment social space and to slow the sequence of reform through their own economic policies. Thus, even the neoliberalism of the Kim and Roh governments are mislabeled as policies “imprisoned by old ideology and populism to incite the masses.”[iv] This has the consequence of obscuring the reform period and identifying the periods where more progressive demands were not met by the reform bloc, and where alternative arrangements were possible. In other words, it obscures political difference and makes all democratic demands of the reform period out to be a form of excess.

III.

I want to make the argument that the point of making the sequence of democratic reform illegible is not simply political opportunism but to obscure the rupturing of social space inherent in democratic events and democratic struggles. It is this sense of rupture, foundational to any proper politics (construed as a sense of contesting the problems of existing social structures), that is being made illegible here and is the fear of conservative politicians, even, quite often, those on the liberal left.

To better understand the sense of rupture associated with the democracy struggle it is important to scrutinize the effects of particular events on the democratic transition. I date the political sequence of democratic reform roughly from the events of the June Democratic Uprising and Great Workers’ Struggles of the 1987. These events effected the transition towards representative democracy. However, the roots of these mobilizations extend further back and have their origins in the social movements against the dictatorships of Park Chung Hee (1961-1979) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980-1987).[v] The events of 1987 were not isolated, but, rather, they were dense points within a constellation of many different events.[vi] Not the least of these was the democratic trade union movement of the 1970s and the Kwangju uprising of the 1980 -- these events were a part of the larger build-up to 1987. During this period, the urban space of the city, the space of the export factory, and the peninsula as a whole became a site of social protest. The fleeting moments of change experienced in the events of 1987, and other protests both before and after, are still retained in the memory of many of the participants, and the potentiality for social change that exists here is what, in many ways, continues to threaten the established order.

In the events, the borders of social space, of exportist industrialization, Cold War anticommunism, and militarized masculinity were temporarily broken. At the theoretical level, this feeling of rupture is perhaps best captured by Kristen Ross who has dealt at length with the effects of events such as mass uprisings on social space.[vii] She describes how events such as uprisings and general strikes allow, “if only for an instant, the exploration of other possible lives, a vast unexplored area of possibility.”

In her understanding of democratic events, Ross also touches on the impossibility of tolerating the present moment, the return of status quo politics, after experiencing revolutionary ferment. “When life has been lived differently, and when it seems as though it just might continue to be lived differently, when all this is fading and existence threatens to lapse once again into the dreary routine… how can this possibly be tolerated?” (141), she asks. When a sequence, a moment, is obscured or ‘taken back’ by the forces of order, it is lost, perhaps irretrievably. Ross argues that this is a process that is spatial as much as it is social as “What is lost is not simply the physical space of the occupation but also the act of the momentary taking (prise) of power, the taking of speech, the taking of conscience (141).

The reason why the demands of the democracy movement for egalitarian democracy (and not simply national unification) are dangerous to the conservative order and must be obscured is that the past shows the “people” or the “minjung” (the Korean word for the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’) coming into existence in the actuality of their refusal of the status quo. By making the past illegible, “it is this version of the people that is difficult now to locate.” Thus in conservative discourse the ‘minjung’ is replaced with ‘somin’ (common people), a subject with less agency. But nonetheless, notions of ‘the people’ or the minjung do resurface, in current social struggles, that “unsettle the present, to disturb its forgetfulness,” in opposition to the narratives of both the right and centre-left that seek to confine popular agency to the past. (142) Recent disruptions such as the 2008 ‘made cow’ protests and the mass mourning of Roh Moo Hyun last summer show a return of popular agency of masses, and yet, the interpretation of these events has been to consider them as hysterical moments, and thus defer any question about the demands and potentialities produced in them. During the reform governments, liberal-left reformers were complicit in this process as they also attempted to restore conservative social space through cracking down on labour protests, discouraging industrial unionism, and rolling out neoliberal financial strategies. They too participated in a politics that deferred participation in the name of economic inevitability of market forces, creating empty time in which social struggles were required to wait, patiently and let the economy run its course.

IV.

Here we have, in the terminology of Jacques Rancierre, a process of politics as a police operation.[viii] A politics that ignores popular agency by closing off areas of government policy from popular participation and saying “there is nothing here that is happening, move on keep going.” This is the sense of politics as dispersal, and it comes up against politics as an active process of bringing up exclusions and exposing lacunae in the established socio-political order. Thermidorean politics reserves politics for only those that are deemed to have ‘interest,’ such as property developers and the conglomerates, and popular agency is dispersed. Again, the police say, “it is only we who have interest, all you others, go back to your daily lives, there is nothing here.”

The most troubling part of the Korean thermidor is that the politicians active in the reaction to this sequence are not simply those politicians of the right. They are also many former left activists, often of the National Liberation variety, such as Kim Young Hwan, but also from various other factions, such as former Peoples Democracy activist Shin Ji Ho. In France, Badiou notes, the actual thermidoreans of 1794 were not foreign aristocrats, or even Girondins, but were part of the Robespierrist majority in the Convention. So too, the Korean thermidor involves a mismatch of interests, including many former democracy movement activists and various politicians of the liberal-left and the right (Badiou 135). One might say that thermidorean politics shares a lot the sense of righteousness that accompanied earlier factional disputes of the 1980s movement -- and perhaps that is why many of the former ideologues of these debates are now part of the reaction -- but it shares nothing of the sense of possibility of the earlier events.

I want to conclude by suggesting that the Korean thermidor is a particular kind of forgetting, one in which social memories are associated with a chimera of the ultra left. This fiction only serves to keep politics as a police operation where no one asks questions and politics is dispersed, left only to private property and established interest. This obscures thinking about what possible alternatives might have been, and how best to organize an economic that is participatory, egalitarian and democratic. It also prevents us from understanding how democratic demands shape space, obscuring the impasses of past periods and making it difficult to extract lessons that might help us understand the current moment.

[i] Alain Badiou. (2006) Metapolitics. London: Verso

[ii] As Kim Dong Choon has argued civil society (simin sahoe) in Korea is largely concerned with societal transformation and thus the priorities of the democracy movement still continue to inform it. It is not merely a passive sphere of interest group mediation. See Kim, Dong-Choon. (2006) “Growth and Crisis of the Korean Citizen’s Movement.” Korea Journal. Summer 2006, pp. 99-128. See also, Lee, Nam-Hee (2007) The Making of the Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lee, Nam-hee. (2007) ‘The South Korean student movement: Undongkwon as a

counterpublic sphere’ in Charles Armstrong ed. Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State. Second Edition. London: Routledge 95-121. Unless otherwise stated, all Korean names cited here begin with the surname followed by first name of the author.

[iii] See, for example, Hankyoreh, 20 May 2009. “President of KUNA announces resignation due to a “political

audit.” http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/355848.html [Accessed 20 May 2009].

Hankyoreh, 21 April 2009. “Subsidies cut to civic groups who participated in candlelight

vigil demonstrations.” http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/350677.html [Accessed

May 2009]. Hankyoreh. 14 May 2009. “Police’s irrational response against civil society. “http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/354903.html [Accessed March 2010].

[iv] See the New Right Founding Declaration. http://www.486.or.kr/english/sub1c.php

[v] One could also argue that this sequence goes back much further to anti-imperialist period, or the suppression of socialist and even social democratic movements in Korea in the interwar years between liberation and the Korean War.

[vi] Though only momentarily, Lee Myung Bak was also part of the early democracy movement. He was arrested and served four months in prison for leading demonstrations against the normalization of diplomatic ties with Japan in 1964. See Hankyoreh “Who is Lee Myung-bak? A profile of the man of myth and his bid to lead the nation.” 22 September 2007, http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/230316.html Accessed 19 March 2010.

[vii] See Kristin Ross. (2002) May ’68 and its afterlives. University of Chicago Press.

[viii] See Jacques Rancierre. (2001) Ten Theses on Politics. Theory and Event. Vol. 5 Issue 3.

Copyleft. Jamie Doucette 2010

Korean Autonomism and Poststructuralism

2010-04-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

[Note: this is an older post that I've migrated from my other blog]

After the 1980s in South Korea in general and after the democratic uprising of 1987 and the fall of the Soviet Union in particular, the Korean Left underwent radical changes. One consequence of this transition is that a number of theorists from both the 80s movements and early 90s student movement began to move towards different heretical, anti-authoritarian traditions of social thought. Some embraced more Deleuzian/Foucauldian/Lacanian trajectories while others sketched out a more Autonomia-style form of thought. Of course, there are theorists of many other stripes as well, from Athussarians to Trotskyists, but I'd like to focus on two of these currents here and highlight some of their publications in English.

The Suyu + Trans Research Machine is an intellectual commune led by a number of poststructural thinkers. It is a pretty amazing place. They have managed to run a collective cafe, restaurant, seminar schedule and research institute through membership fees and individual donations. They are also involved in general anti-neoliberal activism emphasizing support for environment and peace campaigns, and support for irregular and migrant workers. They have also translated a lot of poststructuralist thought into Korean and written quite an amount on their own. Here is a article about the establishment of the commune after the political sequence of the 1980s movements began to transform: What do Commune-ists think? Unfortunately you'll need a library proxy to access it, I think.

The Twilight of Empire was a manifesto put out by the Suyu folks around the time of the negotiation of the Korea-US free trade agreement and has political mix of tones from Agamben, Negri, and Deleuze to it. There is criticism of the sovereign exception used in Neoliberalism, and it endorses a political project of mobilizing the multitude, and of minorities widely construed, instead of left nationalism (the dominant left position in South Korea).

Another problem with interpellating nation as the subject of struggle is that it may conceal the disastrous effects of the FTA that is “yet to come,” effects which diverse minority groups in our society are “already” experiencing. The U.S.-South Korea FTA, which seems to have taken us by surprise, has been tailing the young, the disabled, women, migrant workers, non-regular workers, and all the creatures of the tidal flats for a much longer time, under the guise of GDP, market competition, neo-liberalism, and the calculation of economic profits. We must realize that our society has encouraged or neglected the exploitation of these minorities. The unimaginable scale and intensity of disaster that the U.S.-South Korea FTA entails will be the messenger that will inform us that the pain of those minorities that we have overlooked can become our own. Hence, the struggle against the FTA should start not from the nation, but from the minorities, the masses, and the multitude.

A more recent work on a similar theme and written by Goh Byeon-Gwon, a founding member of the commune, is Marginalization vs minoritization: expulsion by the state and flight of the masses. It is also worth a read.

Outside of Suyu, Joe Jeong Hwan and the multitude network center seem to embrace a more classical autonomist perspective and focus on issues of class composition. Joe Jeong-Hwan's article Class Composition in South Korea Since the Neoliberal Economic Crisis (the 1997 one, not the current crisis) was published a few years back in Multitudes Journal, which is open access. Here is an excerpt:

Significantly, the citizen’s movement is having difficulty to define the concept of a ’citizen’. Recently the main current tends to define the citizen as a non-class subject. In contrast, I propose that the ’citizen’ needs to be defined in the context of recomposition of working class accomplished by the industrial restructuring of capital since the 1980s. The industrial restructuration centered upon high-tech and informational industries since the 1980s have figured a different form of labor power. This different form of labor power has acquired a more scientific-technological character and, as a result of it, the school, home, and society have all been transformed into factories of reproduction. We should consider the weakening of the traditional labor movement as the effect of this process. The relative ratio of industrial laborers has been reduced as a result of the diversification of the working class. Therefore, ’citizen’ is but an old label to which have been attached new labor subjects composed of plural and heterogeneous multitudes.

Joe J-H also has a blog in Korean, with some English and Esperanto posts (yes, Esperanto). He has translated a number of Negri's books and has a new book of his own, Literature of Kairos, out now. Too bad these aren't translated into English.

Anyways, if you are curious about different non-nationalist left trajectories of Korean thought, this post should get you started. I might also post in the future about art collectives in South Korea that use situationist or autonomia style tactics, which is a topic I'm planning to write more about some day. Perhaps through a review of the book that came out of this exhibition.

It has been a long time, I know...

2010-04-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

(This park is near where I live in Vancouver)

Well, it has nearly been a year since I've posted anything. Let's just say that I've been very busy over the last year writing longer stuff and finishing my PhD (yes, it is finito!). In case you are interested, I have a number of things out/coming out. My dissertation, The Postdevelopmental State: The Reconfiguration of Political Space and the Politics of Economic Reform in South Korea, is an exploration developmental state theory, the liberal left, and the restructuring of Korean political economy, and available here. I also have a piece -- The Terminal Crisis of the Participatory Government and the Election of Lee Myung Bak -- in the Journal of Contemporary Asia on the internal problems of reform politics in Korea (email me through the blog if you'd like a pdf copy). I also have a review of Kevin Grays Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalization in the same issue. More recently, there is also this article I've written with Rob Prey for Japan Focus -- Between Migrant and Minjung: The Changing Face of Migrant Cultural Activism in South Korea -- about the migrant movement and recent deportations of key activists. So, although I haven't been posting much here, dear readers, I have been busy and writing on topic.

A year or two ago I started another blog, Imperfect Composition. The idea here was to have blog where I could write some random, and I mean random, stuff. Thought-experiments if you'd like. The thing is, I haven't really used it too much. There is one post on a Korea-related topic there, so I will move that over to here. I will also post the text from a short talk I recently gave above, as it may be of interest to some readers. There is also some other stuff coming out in a few months I will put up later.

Hold a press conference, go to jail

2009-05-07T12:30:00.000-07:00

(All your press conferences are belong to us)

With a busier schedule, this blog had become mostly defunct. I might try to post here a bit more frequently now that I have more time. No promises, however. There has been just too much stuff to report on: the Yongsan tragedy, ongoing canal development, irregular workers movement, the ridiculous New Right movement, the investigation into Roh, Youtube's appropriate response to the real name system, the Minerva witch-hunt, and so on...

On top of all that there is the recent phemenon of breaking up press conferences and calling them protests. Tragicomic, all of it. From the Hankyoreh,

Civic and social groups actively contest curtailment of rights

Civic and social groups have begun launching an active response to police suppression that has been citing press conferences as illegal gatherings and rounding participants for arrest.

Several human rights groups joined in solidarity to present a petition on the police suppression of press conferences to the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) on Wednesday. Before presenting the petition, they held a press conference...

Park Ju-min, a lawyer and member of MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society, said, “We have even been hearing that there is an internal directive to regard all press conferences where slogans are chanted and banners hung as illegal gatherings.” Park added, “It is only possible to become a nation that promotes human rights when freedoms of assembly and expression are observed.”

Participants in the press conference made references to both the arrest of six civic group members who were in front of the National Police Agency building Monday protesting the arrest of people attending events commemorating the first anniversary of the candlelight vigil demonstrations, and the arrest of 49 university students who were holding a press conference and head-shaving ceremony on April 10.

Police have been ramping up their interventions of press conferences recently by broadcasting warnings and measuring noise levels. In reference to this, Jinbo Corea spokesperson Jang Man-seok said the police have “established a position to shut off all expressions of political ideas, including press conferences.”

Observers are criticizing the police’s approach of treating press conferences as illegal gatherings as an exploitation of loopholes in the law. “There are no stipulations on assemblies in the Law on Assemblies and Demonstrations, and the stipulations on protests are vague. The police are exploiting this, and are arbitrarily designating press conferences as assemblies,” said Park Ju-min.

Slow Posting

2008-10-02T14:01:00.000-07:00

Been slow posting these days, because, well, work and life are too busy. However, with the global financial crisis and LMB's continuing show, I feel like there is a mountain of things to post on. Alas, hopefully, there shall be time for that later. For the moment, however, this photo, from the Hankyoreh, is very interesting and mimics that famous moment from the 1989 protests in Tienanmen square.

Disarming appearance

As tanks roll down Tehran Street in the Gangnam district during a parade commemorating Army Day on October 1, Kang Ui-seok, 22, a law student at Seoul National University, goes nude to urge the government to dissolve the army.

Kang appeared suddenly at 4:20 p.m and commenced with a short role play in which he brandished a fake gun he had made out of snack food, putting a stop to the parade for about 30 seconds. Kang was arrested immediately.

Police said that prior to the parade, Kang hid for 12 hours in a trench he had dug himself.

According to police, Kang said that If Korea were to dissolve its army, it could help underdeveloped countries by saving the lives of starving children. In explaining his demonstration, Kang said that he had appeared in the nude to symbolize the condition of being unarmed and was meant to evoke peace and nonviolence.

The police booked him on charges of obscenity later that day.

buddha background

2008-09-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

Hye Jin Kim from Global Voices Online has a good overview of the motivating factors behind the continuing protests by buddhists here, including some of the reactions from netizens like the one below:

On the date when 200,000 Buddhists started the protest, the government announced a beautiful spy scandal like Mata Hari. What did the National Intelligence Service do for 10 years? I knew someday soon North Korean spies would be arrested once the government changed. And a beautiful spy who has sex as her weapon was sensationally caught on the same date when those Buddhists gathered. As history has proved so far, the moment of the public announcement is perfect this time again. The story is so similar with those you can see in Sunday Seoul or Sunday Newspaper. I read what she has done. In the technological period of the 21st century, what she did was to find information that we ordinary people can even simply find through searching on google, and using gps and the internet. Wow… she is such a stupid spy. I really don’t understand what North Korea tried to do with her.[…] Restoration of Baek-gol-dan and female North Korean spy… It seems that we return to 20 years back. Maybe, Samchung Revival Camp and control of hair and skirt lengths will start again.[…]

buddhists protest

2008-08-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

From today's Hankyoreh:

Buddhists protest perceived bias in Lee administration
200,000 protesters demand apology from President Lee and resignation of National Police Agency Chief Eo

In what was the first event of its kind, approximately 200,000 Buddhists belonging to 27 Buddhist denominations protested in downtown Seoul on August 27 against what they called religious discrimination on the part of President Lee Myung-bak’s administration.

The Ven. Wonhak, head of the organizing committee for what was called the “All Buddhists’ Assembly for Denouncing the Lee Myung-bak Administration’s Constitution-Destroying Religious Discrimination,” said that Korean Buddhism is in the most “distressful” state it has been in “since it came to Korea 1,700 years ago.”

“Buddhism has been kicked out into the street by thoughtless fanatics who dream of a Christian republic,” he said.

Monks and regular believers filled the streets in front of Seoul City Hall, from Taepyeongno and Deoksu Palace to the corner of the Hanwha Building.

Kim Kwang-jun, an Anglican priest who is head of the National Council of Churches of Korea’s Committee on Interfaith Dialogue, issued a statement of solidarity.

“As a Christian I apologize for cases of religious discrimination, like when Rev. Jang Gyeong-dong caused controversy for insulting Buddhism,” said Kim. “The Lee administration has discarded the principle of separation of church and state and even the principles of democracy, all in the name of pragmatism.”

Protesters issued a resolution demanding an open apology from President Lee, the resignation of National Police Agency Chief Eo Cheong-soo, the legislation of a prohibition on religious discrimination, and “favorable consideration” by the authorities for people wanted for involvement in the candlelight protests.

Organizers said they will be operating a “Religious Discrimination Monitoring Group” to determine whether President Lee takes action in good faith on their demands, and that they will organize similar protests across the country if he does not.

In the afternoon, protesters marched to Jogye Temple, going from the Sejongno intersection to Jonggak and on to Ujeonggugno. The police mobilized approximately 7,000 police officers from 85 riot police units.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government says it will fine the organizers for “using” Seoul City Hall Plaza without a permit.

Oh se chul arrested

2008-08-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

This is from the Korea Times:

Economist Nabbed for Praising Socialism

By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

Police arrested a renowned economist for speaking out against capitalism, which is in violation of the National Security Law. Civic groups and academics are criticizing the government for suppressing so-called progressive scholars over false information.

Some are worrying whether these new moves will bring back the ``public security'' era when police used excessive force against people under the name of ``keeping the peace'' in the authoritarian era of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said Wednesday it had arrested Oh Se-cheol, honorary professor at Yonsei University, and seven other Socialist Workers League of Korea members on Tuesday. The eight are now being questioned in Ogin-dong, central Seoul, over whether they have criticized capitalism and praised socialism as well as other acts considered benefiting the enemy ― the North Korea.

The police spokesman said Oh, chairman of the league, and others have released leaflets and other materials denouncing liberal capitalism. The group's flags were seen at the candlelit protests against U.S. beef imports, he added.

The investigative body also said Oh openly sought the establishment of a revolutionary socialist group saying, ``We are the revolutionary forces that declare the world proletarian revolution publicly and express the determination to struggle with the proletariat of the world including Korea in the history of the workers' movement and communist movement in Korea after 1945,'' on the group's Web site.

However, academia and others are criticizing the police's moves since Oh is well known for denouncing North Korea. Roh Hoe-chan of the minor New Progressive Party said, ``Oh and his groups constantly said the North has been polluted with other ideas in socialism, which all socialists should `refrain from following'. Shouldn't the group be defined as anti-North Korean?''

About 10 civic groups held protests in front of the investigation room saying, ``Why should they be punished for talking about what they believe in, which is obviously not praising the enemy?''

``Oh criticized capitalism even under the military junta in the 1970s but was never prosecuted for violating the law. I do not understand the government's ethics on the issue,'' Prof. Han Sang-hee of Konkuk University said calling for the government's respect on a variety of social ideas.

Some speculate the investigation will see a revival of the debate about whether the National Security Law should be abolished. The law bans all kinds of praise, promotion or sympathy toward the enemy. In this case, the enemy is North Korea, experts say.

Since a reconciliation mood swept the Han peninsula in 2000, there were only two other cases of such groups being involved in violation of the law. During the Roh Moo-hyun administration, the law was submitted for abolishment at the National Assembly.

Meanwhile, Suwon District Public Prosecutors' Office said it caught a female North Korean spy disguised as a defector. According to the office, 34-year-old Won Jeong-hwa disguised herself as a defector in China, married a South Korean man and came to the South in 2001. Then she contacted several military officers and handed over confidential information to the North.

The office has also arrested a military captain who handed over information and another man for delivering such stuff to the North.

regular/irregular

2008-08-19T11:41:00.000-07:00

In the news today:

Gap between regular and irregular workers has grown
Widening difference in salaries and income growth between the two groups since irregular worker protection law was implemented

A survey has revealed that since July of last year, right around the time a law to protect irregular workers went into effect, the income gap between regular and irregular workers in their 20s and 30s grew.

The company Incruit took a look at the 2006 and 2008 first-half wages (based on fixed salaries) of about 30,000 of its own website members between the ages 20 and 39. The data, released Monday, shows that the salary gap between the regular and irregular workers grew by almost 100,000 won in the two-year period. In the first half of 2008, the average monthly salary of regular workers at the company was 2.282 million won, while that of irregular workers was 74 percent of that at 1.689 million won, producing a gap of 593,000 won. The gap had grown from two years earlier. In 2006, the average monthly salary of regular workers was 2.154 million won, while that of irregular workers was 77.1% of that at 1.661 million won, producing a difference of 493,000 won.

There was also a difference in income growth -- this year, regular workers made 5.9 percent more than they did two years ago, while irregular workers only made 1.7 percent more.

This trend can be confirmed in a March survey by the Korea National Statistical Office. In 2007, the salary of irregular workers was 64.1 percent of that of regular workers.; this year, it had fallen to 60.5 percent.

Song Min-jung, a researcher at the Samsung Economic Research Institute, believes that the quality of employment for irregular workers fell after the protection law went into effect, with many irregular workers switching to by-the-hour work or dispatch work with poor working conditions.

Signs of reaction

2008-07-25T12:06:00.000-07:00

Two worrying stories for Korean civil society from today's Hankyoreh below. Some more conservative readers might assert that the government is just asserting law and order in this case. But without laws governing protest that conform in practice and operation to basic freedoms of assembly or association, results like this are bound to happen as it becomes very easy to pin a demonstration on a particular organization or have stuff removed from the internet by decree rather than principled investigation. Anyways, it should be clear that these two stories are simply signs of reaction, which in the end seem certain to alienate people from the current government as they undermine basic normative principles of civil society.

Photo is from CINA.

Arrest warrant issued for 3 KCTU leaders
37 other KCTU leaders summoned for questioning in growing crackdown on candlelight protest organizers

Police began tracking down three leaders of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions on July 24 after a court issued a warrant to arrest them on charges of playing a leading role in organizing large-scale strikes and candlelight demonstrations against U.S. beef imports. The KCTU, one of the nation’s two largest labor umbrella organizations, strongly protested the move, saying they had been “targeted by police.”

Immediately after the court issued the warrant to arrest the three KCTU leaders, Chairman Lee Seok-haeng, Deputy Chairman Jin Young-ok and Secretary-General Lee Yong-sik, the Seoul Yeongdeungpo Police Station dispatched hundreds of police officers, some of them plain-clothed, and cordoned off the KCTU office in an aggressive move demonstrating its will to arrest them.

“Chairman Lee and others played a leading role in massive strikes held by the KCTU to demand renegotiations of beef deal,” a police officer said. “Last year, they also refused to be summoned on charges of masterminding a strike and occupying E-Land stores, in spite of several calls for them to appear. We plan to combine all pending charges to date and conduct an investigation into the KCTU leadership.”

Saying that strikes led by the KCTU on July 2 illegal, prosecution and police ordered 37 senior leaders of the KCTU, including Chairman Lee, to appear for questioning. Arrest warrants were issued for nine of the 37 leaders, including Chairman Lee and Yoon Hae-mo, the chief of Hyundai Motor Co.’s labor union.

In a press conference held at the KCTU office later in the day, Chairman Lee said, “The police action is unfair political suppression of a fair exercise of the right to defend the health of people and laborers. The government of President Lee Myung-bak must immediately stop its suppression.”

NPA orders Google to remove video from YouTube
Footage reports on allegations that NPA Chief’s brother invested in a hotel linked to prostitution

Controversy is flaring after an Internet crime investigation unit of the National Police Agency was found to have ordered Google Inc.’s YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing Web site, to remove footage from a South Korean TV report about allegations that a company in which a brother of NPA Chief Eo Cheong-soo invested was involved in prostitution. The NPA also ordered domestic Internet portals such as Naver and Daum to delete the video footage, which was originally televised by Munhwa Broadcasting Corp.’s Busan branch. Under South Korean laws governing the Internet, a person can ask an Internet portal to remove information from its Web site if the information defames the person in question. The NPA has been accused of taking unlawful and excessive action towards Internet portals, where freedom of expression and communications should be guaranteed, to defend the reputation of the NPA chief’s family.

On July 24, an official at Google’s Korea unit said, “We received an official statement on May 27 from the NPA’s cyber terrorism countermeasure team demanding that we delete video footage about a brother of NPA Commissioner General Eo Cheong-soo, citing defamation. That evening, we temporarily deleted two pieces of video footage. The Internet Protocol addresses for both pieces of video footage are blocked so users in South Korea can’t access them,” the official said. The NPA was found to have sent the same official statement to other local Internet portals such as Naver and Daum as well as video-sharing Web sites.

The original footage, aired by MBC’s Busan branch on April 23, reported that the brother of NPA Commissioner General Eo had allegedly managed a hotel that allowed prostitution. The report was credited with the “This Month’s Journalist” award from the Journalist Association of Korea in June. Yang Guen-won, the head of the NPA’s Internet crime investigation unit, said police had “sent an official letter, according to legal procedure, after judging that the controversial report broadcast by Busan MBC is related to the reputation of the entire police organization, not just Commissioner General Eo Cheong-soo himself.”

However, critics blamed the NPA for taking excessive action because, under the current laws, it has no right to ask Internet portals to delete the video footage and it has not taken any legal action, such as filing a complaint with the Press Arbitration Commission.

Kim Gap-bae, an attorney, said, “The Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection permits a person to ask an Internet portal to remove posted material if the person feels they have been defamed. For defamation cases involving public officials, in particular, an individual, not a state organization, should file the complaint.”

Unlike domestic Internet portals, Google’s Korean unit strictly bans it from editing materials posted on its Web site. Google’s Korean unit asked a legal department at its U.S. headquarters to sort out whether the video footage could cause defamation, and Google’s U.S. headquarters replied that it could not be constituted as such. In spite of the reply, Google’s Korean unit had still blocked the footage for 56 days, or until July 23, when The Hankyoreh began investigating the issue.

This means that South Koreans cannot watch the video footage on the Korean-language version of the YouTube Web site, but the footage is still available at other YouTube sites based in the United States and other nations.

Internet users have criticized the police and Google’s Korean unit, saying, “Police are curbing freedom of expression on the Internet unconditionally, making the country a state in which censorship still exists.”

KWWA

2008-07-23T00:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated links for a long time on this blog and I was just getting started and realized that the Korean Women's Workers Association have a new site and an excellent, frequently updated blog in English. I've updated the link on the right to go to their new site. The picture above is from a recent rally for a 1 million won (US 1000 a month) minimum wage.

Changes to laws around foreign workers

2008-07-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

Very interesting development in terms of foreign workers these days. Workers will now be able to work for 5 years and can change workplaces. These were both demands made by the Equality Trade Union -- Migrant Branch (predecessor of the MTU) back when the EPS was being negotiated. How to regard this development? What does it mean for the migrant rights movement?

I guess it is a partial victory. The 5 year concession was something there was more support for from the small business federation back in the day, the change of workplace procedure probably came from a number of sources inside the ministry, civil society, employers etc. Both aspects of the policy are obviously designed to prevent workers from becoming undocumented as after 3 years most workers haven't paid back the illegal brokerage fees that they have paid, if they had to pay them, which I believe they do in a majority of cases, and when faced with exploitation in the workplace many workers change workplaces but become undocumented in the process, so this change in the law should improve conditions generally in terms of the number of people without status.

What it does not address, however, is the claim for justice on behalf of those migrant that have been in Korea the longest and who were excluded from the EPS as an act of punishment. Unfortunately, I think it will have the effect of diminishing solidarity for them as the problems in the EPS used to continuously force people into undocumented status who then feel more solidarity with longer term migrants. I think it is these migrants that an amnesty and some sort of designation allowing them to apply for residency is needed, so they can go about their lives as they have been trying to for years in the midst of continually changes permit systems and perpetual crackdown. This is an important question of distributive justice. Those migrants with families and long term roots should be considered first, but the 'right hand' of the state (Justice, and Interior ministries) do not recognize the social suffering of these people, they even cause much of it, and therein the problem exists.

Here's the article from the Times:

Foreigners Can Work for Up to 5 Years By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

From July 28, foreign nationals will be able to work for up to five straight years without having to make the obligatory one-month sojourn outside Korea to extend their job contracts, the Ministry of Labor said Tuesday.

According to the revised Foreign Workers Employment Law, those currently allowed to work for up to three years will be able to extend their contracts for another two years. Currently, they have to leave the country for one month before renewal.

``Foreign workers complained over the cost involved in the one-month trip and management said their absence damaged business,'' Kim Yeon-shik, a ministry official, said.

Employment procedures will also change for management to hire more eligible persons. Under the current system, employers have to pick workers from those passing a Korean language test without screening their individual details.

But a new list will show each jobseeker's qualifications and career record. Employers will also be able to recruit directly via interviews overseas.

Workers will also get additional support. The government will provide job information to ethnic Korean Chinese people to help them settle in Korea more easily after signing work contracts.

In order to prevent workplace exploitation, conditions will be specified that allow workers to transfer to other companies. Workers can apply for transfers when wages are delayed and if their employer violates the Korean Labor Law.

``Under the new system, employers will be able to secure manpower from overseas and workers can easily adjust to Korean society,'' the official said.

The current employment permit system (EPS) allows a maximum three-year contract and renewal of up to two years, while the transfer of workplaces is limited to factory closures or worksite abuse.

In April, 377,032 foreigners were working under the EPS and 75.4 percent of them were working at companies with less than 30 on their payroll.

the streets are full again

2008-07-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

Well, the protests are back on with about estimates of 80,000 -- 400,000 on the streets (looks around 200,000 from the pic below. Here's a link to more pics at the OMN site.

This one is from around 10pm.

This group seems to be international these days; a youth subculture, in Canada they seem to focus on protesting scientology.

Early evening.

I haven't heard anything about the 'anti-protest' that was planned. I think they were probably drowned, exponentially.

ILO on Song Hae Bae Sang

2008-07-04T23:44:00.000-07:00

I just pulled this of the Metal Worker's page. Seems the ILO has weighed in on a number of practices that limit workers freedom of association. Especially the use of damage claims to discourage workers from unionizing or going on strike. This practice has pretty notorious since it began in the 2000s. The problem is that the legal basis for collective action is not up to international standards so it is pretty easy for employers to sue workers for union activity. The ILO has been trying to bring Korea up to convention standards for a few years now.

ILO makes recommendations on irregular workers in South Korea

ILO Committee on Freedom of Association calls on Korean government to investigate and remedy alleged anti-union acts against falsely subcontracted workers and requests that obstruction of business laws are brought into line with freedom of association principles.
SOUTH KOREA: The International Metalworkers' Federation joined the Korean Metal Workers' Union and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions at a press conference in Seoul today, July 3, welcoming the findings of the International Labour Organization on the complaint against the Korean government. The ILO has called on the Korean government to investigate and remedy alleged anti-union acts against falsely subcontracted workers at Hyundai Motors, Hynix/Magnachip, Kiryung Electronics and KM&I and to take all necessary measures to promote collective bargaining for subcontracted workers. Significantly, the ILO requests that the Korean government "take all necessary measures without delay" to bring "obstruction of business" laws into line with freedom of association principles. The Committee states that, "violence, criminal sanctions or disproportionately heavy pecuniary penalties are not conducive to a constructive industrial relations climate, especially in the absence of affirmative measures to promote dialogue and collective bargaining." During the press conference IMF called on the Korean government to restore the rights of the Kiryung women workers who are over 20 days into a collective hunger strike in protest of their unfair dismissal. "The ILO clearly states that "The non-renewal of a contract for anti-union reasons constitutes a prejudicial act within the meaning of Article 1 of Convention No. 98." I hope that the government heeds this strongly worded recommendation to reinstate the workers," said IMF General Secretary Marcello Malentacchi. These and other recommendations to the Korean government are included in an interim report issued by the Committee on Freedom of Association in June 2008 in response to the complaint lodged by KMWU, the KCTU and the IMF. The unions made the complaint against the Korean government for neglecting to protect and facilitating violation of subcontracted workers' rights to freedom of association, collective bargaining and collective action, in breach of ILO Conventions 87 and 98. The complaint, case number 2602, details a series of violations dating from 2004 to 2006 at Hyundai Motors plants in Ulsan, Asan and Jeonju and at Hynix/Magnachip, Kiryung Electronics and KM&I. For a copy of the Interim Report and recommendations from the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association click on this link. For a summary of the details of the complaint, click here.

two stories of note

2008-07-02T03:01:00.000-07:00

Both of these are from today's Hankyoreh:

Members of the New Progressive Party try to fix the party’s broken signboard at their headquarters on July 1. The signboard was broken by members of an association of former members of the Headquarters Of Intelligence Detachment, the seat of South Korea’s secret counterintelligence operation. On the evening, members of the association made a assault at the headquarters of NPP, and resulted in property damage, some persons of injuries and five arrests, .

According to police and an NPP official, five members of the association arrived at the NPP’s headquarters shouting, “Come out Jin Joong-gwon! We will kill all communists!” Jin, a journalist and activist who is known for his criticism of both conservatives and liberals alike, has been active in broadcasting reports from the site of the candlelight protests since they began on May 2.

During assault of the association members, one woman of NPP was injured and a man of NPP hospitalized. Jin was also injured. All five association members, including the secretary-general, were arrested.

Religious groups get involved in candlelight protests
On edge, gov’t reaches out to religious leaders to placate protesters

The South Korean government, which has been getting tougher on candlelight rallies for renegotiation of the U.S. beef agreement, is on high alert as Christian and Buddhist groups have begun to join the demonstrations, following an “emergency mass” led by the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice on June 30. With religious groups joining the candlelight rallies, the protests have grown and are peaceful once again. The government, for its part, seems to be trying to reach out to the organizations.

On July 1, Christian groups, including the National Council of Churches in Korea, said they would hold an “emergency prayer meeting” in front of Seoul’s City Hall on the evening of July 3. Buddhist groups, including the Solidarity for Buddhist Environment and LotusWorld, plan to hold a large-scale Buddhist service on July 4.

“Catholic, Christian and Buddhist groups are trying to overcome the situation. If there is no change in the government’s stance, we will consider issuing a statement signed by the leaders of seven groups representing seven different denominations,” said Yang Deok-chang, a senior official with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea.

The “emergency mass” held by the CPAJ on June 30 was attended by some 30,000 citizens, all holding candles, on the plaza in front of City Hall. Led by the Catholic priests, citizens marched peacefully past Namdaemun, Seoul’s South Gate, and Myeong-dong, instead of heading to the presidential office of Cheong Wa Dae, or the Blue House.

The activities of the Buddhist groups in particular have put the government on edge. Buddhist groups have long felt that the government is more partial to Christian groups, perhaps because President Lee Myung-bak is a confirmed Christian and an elder at Somang Presbyterian Church in Seoul.

The CPAJ’s participation is also worthy of note. It was active in the pro-democracy movement of the 70s and 80s and has come to serve as a kind of moral compass. Last fall, it represented Kim Yong-cheol when he brought allegations of corruption against Samsung Group.

As if the government sensed the urgency of the situation, Prime Minister Han Seung-soo said, without any prior notice, that he would meet with Ven. Jigwan, the executive chief of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, the country’s biggest Buddhist sect. The meeting was cancelled, however, due to a protest by alliance of Buddhist groups organizing the July 4 Buddhist service, which called on the prime minister to first draw up his plans for renegotiation of the U.S. beef agreement before meeting with the Ven. Jigwan. The prime minister is also believed to be considering meeting with various religious leaders, including leaders of Catholic and Christian groups.

In a rare move, Culture Minister Yu In-chon proposed opening a “direct dialogue” between the government and the People’s Countermeasure Council Against Mad Cow Disease, which has been a leading organizer of the candlelight rallies. In an interview with CBS radio, Yu said, “So far, (the government and the organizers of the candlelight rallies) have only told their side of the story, but it seems there has not been much chance for the two sides to meet and talk with each other. The most urgent thing is dialogue.”

“As the government has no channel for talks with the rally organizers, I’m asking some people to hold talks. To open a channel for discussion, I think the organization leaders who are in detention need to be treated with leniency,” Yu said.

Cheong Wa Dae has so far declined to comment on the situation, but was believed to be monitoring the situation closely. It also appears to be taking extra precautions as religious groups are now involved in the candlelight demonstrations.

However, it’s uncertain whether the government action will placate candlelight protesters and religious groups because it lost trust with a violent crackdown on the rallies, during which it called the candlelight protests “illegal” and “violent.” Civic groups responding to the culture minister’s proposal to hold talks with the People’s Countermeasure Council said that the proposal is “nonsense, because police have already arrested some of the activists from the council.”

Neoliberalism gone wacky

2008-06-17T23:18:00.000-07:00

What is interesting about the truckers strike that is now going is that the government is saying that it is going to force truckers back to work. However, truckers are considered 'self-employed' and therefore it is their right to refuse a contract. In other words lacking a collective agreement they have the option of 'exit' under contract law. This a feature of a lot of neoliberal labour market flexibilization, but the government does not want to recognize even this. It's funny, many of the truckers would like instead to be considered workers, with a collective agreement, but the government won't recognize that either. So, that is the present dilemma. The government says truckers are workers and then orders them back to work, the truckers say they are workers and demand a contract but the government says they are self employed and thus not allowed to collectively bargain. There is the paradox, it doesn't even seem to be about defining how one participates in the market anymore: with a collective or individual contract, instead it seems purely about a harder form of class power and the forced compulsion to work.

[Editorial] Redefining the meaning of a laborer

One of the primary reasons why the Korea Cargo Workers Union strikes again and again is that a permanent negotiation between the KCWU and the shippers is impossible. Since the law categorizes drivers who own their cargo trucks as self-employed, it is impossible for the KCWU and a representative group of shippers to negotiate several issues, including the transport rate. As a result, all things came to a head and a large-scale strike cripples cargo movement once every few years. That is why the government needs to acknowledge laborer rights of KCWU members at this point and move forward with discussions to grant them a legal status the same as, or similar to, laborers.

In fact, the problem, regardless of the KCWU’s strike, has been one of the key labor issues in which the government should play a leading role to resolve. Like cargo truck drivers, there are a growing number of people who work like laborers but are categorized self-employed. Labor organizations estimated the number of those workers, who are described as specially-employed workers, stood at some 1.8 million people.

Of them, many workers became “self-employed” at the request of their employers and signed a subcontracting or consignment contract, instead of a labor contract. Until the early 1990s, most drivers of cargo trucks and ready-mixed concrete vehicles were regular workers at construction companies. As the companies handed over their trucks to drivers and changed their contract formats, the drivers became a “personal businessperson” only in appearance.

In European nations and Japan, there is an overall trend where the government grants legal rights for specially-hired workers, by categorizing them as a laborer or a worker similar to a laborer. In 1974, the German government allowed the specially-employed people to join or establish a labor union after introducing the concept of a worker similar to a laborer. The French government guarantees collective rights for specially-employed workers.

In particular, it is notable because the number of specially-employed people has sharply risen since the IMF bailout in late 1997. By changing the contract format, an employer is freed from following labor laws and paying for various types of insurance such as workers’ compensation. To avoid regulations and financial burdens, it is certain that employers would intensify their efforts to change the contract format. It is time for the government and the National Assembly to make sincere efforts to redefine the meaning of a laborer and expand the scope of it.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]

Tireless blogging

2008-06-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

The new Castle MB?

I don't know how to measure Matt' s frankly scary blogging productivity, but I can celebrate it. Here are links to a lot of interesting photos, commentary, and organizational context involving the protests, here and here, the picture above is from the second link.

Korea's image, brand in trouble?

2008-06-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

I really don't like to editorialize much but here is a link to an interview with a foreign consultant in the Korea times discussing how Korea's brand image was in trouble.

``Sometimes it can be good to have discussion and lively debate, but if it's not in the right context, people may say, 'oh my god what's happening there,''' he said.

Korea used to be known as a country of the "miracle" due to its rapid transformation from a war-ravaged agricultural economy into a manufacturing powerhouse, but it has lost its glorious image and is now turning into a republic of "protest."

Essentially, it is good example of the narrow minded frame of much of the mainstream press, in Korea and abroad (our National Post says much the same thing) as well as some segments of the business community for profit which would rather see government run as a business and not as politics in which collective conflicts are resolved . Anyways, last time I checked Korea was a country, an ensemble of social and cultural relations, not a product. Viewing a country as a brand is not only idiotic, it is dangerous, there is not much democratic in trying to maintain a country's 'product image' instead of providing public goods and social justice.

Castle MB

2008-06-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

From the Hankyoreh:

Barricades that blocked protesters incite widespread resentment

Internet users invent phrases laced with sarcasm to express criticism of gov’t action

» In the photo above, a protester waves the national flag of Korea atop a barricade of shipping containers constructed by the government at dawn on June 11. The sign under the protester reads: “Is this what you call ‘communication?’” The sign skewers President Lee Myung-bak for saying he would communicate with the general public prior to constructing a barrier to keep them out. Below, the barricade is removed in the morning of the same day.

The watchword for the huge candlelight protests attended by up to one million people on June 10 was “Myung-bak castle” (Myungbaksanseong). The word combines the first name of President Lee Myung-bak and a Korean word that means “mountain fortress wall,” with the latter part referring to the rows of shipping containers used by police to block protesters from approaching the Blue House.

A 5.4-meter-high wall of shipping containers filled with sand, one of three such walls, was removed from the main thoroughfare on Sejong Avenue in the early morning of June 11. However, the phrase invoking the barricades is likely to stay on people’s lips as a symbol of President Lee Myung-bak’s refusal to communicate with the citizens of Korea.

The term “Myungbak castle” was first used by Internet users almost instantaneously beginning on June 10, and generated a number of derivatives. As police constructed the shipping containers as a way to block protesters, the term “Welding Myung-bak” (Yongjeopmyungbak) was coined just as quickly. This term refers to the method police used to weld the containers together. Tens of thousands of messages with the term “Welding Myung-bak” were posted on the Internet debate site Agora, which is operated by Daum Communications.

Some of the messages left online exude the sense of sarcasm and scorn felt by the majority of the general public toward the government. One person wrote, “Because a huge fortress wall was constructed overnight, it should be designated as a World Heritage site.”

Another said, “The look of the grand canal and the fortress wall reminds me of Qin Shi Huang.” The Grand Korean Waterway, which would connect Seoul to Busan via three interlocking canals, is one of the president’s pet projects, while Qin Shi Huang was the first emperor of China and built China’s Great Wall.

A composite photograph that combines a photo of the shipping container barricade with a caption saying, “This is the ‘Myungbak castle,’ which has been designated as National Treasure No. 0,” spread rapidly through the Internet.

Behind the widespread criticism and satirical comments, lies a sense of anger and regret over President Lee’s having turned a deaf ear to the public. A 32-year-old office worker who works in Gwanghwamun, downtown Seoul, near the site where the barricades were constructed, said on June 11, “When I saw the ‘Myungbak castle’ on my way to the office, I felt a sense of despair.” The worker, who was only identified by the surname Choi, said, “If (the government) were to think about how to allay public resentment instead of thinking about how to block the voices of the people, it could suggest more than 100 new plans.”

An Internet user with the nickname “Themis” wrote, “With the ‘Myungbak castle,’ the response to citizens holding candles is akin to a trampling of the people’s will. This government has made another big mistake.”

Police officials even criticized the construction of the barricades. A police officer said, “I was surprised to hear about the idea of blocking a main thoroughfare with a wall of containers. With the wall, citizens were made to feel that they were shut out and mistreated. I think the countermeasure seems to have gone wrong.”

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]

See also this interesting article on the new culture of protest involved in the demos.

What next?

2008-06-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

[Photo: some art students at a local Seoul university invented this brilliant piece of protest technology, and have been showing it off at the protests]

After Tuesday's huge protest (which Matt has a good post on here, along with another one on the history of protest in Seoul over the last 100 years), Lee's prime minister and cabinet announced their intention to resign, others are wondering how far the fallout will extend, as even conservative groups are criticizing the president, albeit in a neoconservative fashion that misses the cause of the protests. One thing seems sure: the protests are set to continue:

From the Herald:

Protests against U.S. beef imports and a wide range of government policies are expected to continue through the week as various civic groups plan to stage a series of mass rallies in downtown Seoul.

A coalition of about 1,500 civic groups called "the people's council for countermeasures against mad cow disease" will memorialize the deaths six years ago of two schoolgirls, at Seoul Plaza tomorrow.

They were accidentally run over in Yangju, Gyeonggi Province in 2002 by a U.S. military vehicle. This tragedy brought thousands of citizens to the streets, calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. troops in Korea. Candlelight vigils will be held along with the memorial service.

The coalition has organized the vigils since April 27 in reaction against the April 18 deal on U.S. beef imports, which demonstrators condemn for being made without "public consensus."

Also tomorrow, the Korea Cargo Transport Workers Union will go on strike. It is demanding that the government formulate countermeasures to lesson the burden created by soaring oil prices. The union has linked its planned walkout to the ongoing popular protests against the beef import deal.

On Saturday, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, the biggest umbrella labor group, will vote whether and when to stage a walkout. Members of the KCTU have participated in the vigils.

Also on Saturday, a funeral ceremony will be held for Lee Byeong-ryeol in Seoul and other parts of the nation. Lee, 43, set himself on fire on May 25 in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province, after calling for the toppling of the government. He died on Monday.

Marking the 8th anniversary of the June 15 inter-Korean joint declaration, various civic groups, including the KCTU, will hold a massive commemorative event.

On Tuesday, when 80,000 citizens, according to a police estimate, rallied in Seoul, the "people's council" set a deadline of next Friday for the government to determine whether to scrap or renegotiate the beef deal. The government response, therefore, could either mitigate or escalate the protests, observers said.

During Tuesday's rallies, as protesters and police exercised restraint to avoid violent clashes, vigils proceeded peacefully. No serious injuries were reported. However, police detained 24 sit-in protesters yesterday morning for obstructing traffic at the Sejongno intersection in central Seoul.

It got bigger!

2008-06-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

I'll add to this post later, but it seems from first glance that the protests got absolutely bigger. Here is a story from the BBC and the Korea Times, ohmynews.com has lots of pics and video in Korean.

From what I can tell, it does seem like 800 to 1 million got out nationwide.

As the Korea Times story above reports:

The culmination of a month of protests drew the largest number of protesters ever, coinciding with the June 10 ``People Power'' struggle in 1987, which forced the military dictatorship to adopt a direct presidential election system. It was the first time in more than two decades that such a large number of people gathered in Seoul and other major cities.

People from all walks of life ― from students and workers to former activists who fought for democracy 21 years ago ― joined the rallies, demanding the government renegotiate the beef deal with the United States.

The coalition of civic groups claimed 1 million citizens participated nationwide, including 500,000 in Seoul alone, while police estimated the total number at around 200,000. Tens of thousands of citizens also held separate gatherings in Busan, Gwangju and dozens of other cities around the country.

``As an witness to all major historic events in the past, I took part in this candlelit vigil to join the call for the renegotiation of the beef agreement,'' said Yoo Chung-sik, 69, who accompanied his 63-year-old wife. ``I wanted to share this spirit of freedom though I'm old.''

Hundreds of students marched from Yonsei University to Seoul Plaza, many with the portrait of the late Lee Han-yeol, a former Yonsei student who died after being injured during the 1987 protest. Activists from that time accompanied them.

``I have a lot of worries because of difficulty getting a job. I came here on foot from my school, even though it's an exam period. It reflects the severity of the beef issue,'' said Kim Tom, 23, a student from Yonsei. ``I thought I should come here instead of going to the library.''

Police closed three main roads leading to Cheong Wa Dae by building a two-story barricade of shipping containers. They welded the containers together, filled them with sand and coated their surfaces with grease to prevent demonstrators marching to the presidential office.

Some 40,000 riot police officers were mobilized at major rally sites.

The photos are from Oh my news and show some of the magnitude and some of the humor of this thing.

Ebb or flow?

2008-06-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy of CINA

Well Friday and Saturday nights protests seemed massive. Who knows if Tuesday will be a 'super Tuesday' that protest organizers promise or if things will quiet down a bit. Seems to me that it might be hard to get that many people out on a work night. But things have swelled all of May, so we'll see.

CINA has posted a number of links to stories and photos.

culture of protest

2008-06-06T12:19:00.001-07:00

from the Korea times:

Gone Is Solemnity at Rallies

The words under the photo of a baby squeezing President Lee Myung-bak’s nose reads: “Don’t breathe as oxygen is wasted.”

/ Courtesy of Newsis

By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter

``I drink every day because of you.'' This is not a lament by a jilted lover but a witty criticism written on a placard at a candlelit vigil against President Lee Myung-bak.

The mood at recent candlelit vigils against the resumption of American beef imports is quite different from the past. Far from somber, catchphrases and parodies jeering the authorities often take on amusing and humorous tones ― enough to make onlookers fall about laughing.

In the past, demonstrators, tying red ribbons around their heads, used to try and look as grim as possible, punching their fists in the air and chanting serious make-or-break slogans.

However, these days the atmosphere is lighter.

Students are using short, simple, sarcastic phrases on their placards. A schoolgirl holds a picket saying: ``I've lived only 15 years,'' insinuating that she doesn't want to die of mad cow disease at that age.

Others use funny cow costumes to get their message across. A protestor in a cow outfit was seen holding a flyer that read: ``Mr. President, you go and eat mad cow ― a message from angry Korean cows.''

With many middle and high school students participating in the gatherings, a picture of a girl in her school uniform holding a candle has become the symbol of the rally. A picket held by a teenage girl says: ``We are doing what we've been taught to at school,'' indicating she felt she was doing the right thing.

A demonstrator in cow outfit holds a placard saying: “You (Mr. President) go eat mad cow.” at a candlelit protest against the imports of U.S. beef. / Yonhap

Protestors also ridicule the police. When water cannons were fired on demonstrators, they shouted, ``Why don't you give us hot water?''

When riot police officers stood atop patrol buses to warn demonstrators to disperse, ralliers said, ``Sing for us!'' and ``Dance for us!'' as if they were at a the concert of a pop group.

Demonstrators also put parking tickets on riot police buses parked on the street to block protestors from approaching the presidential house.

After attacking the Web sites of the Seoul Metropolitan Mobile Police and the ruling Grand National Party, hackers also attempted to make fun of the authorities. A picture of a polar bear that looks scared popped up at the main page of police, with the bear saying, ``It.. it hurts when you be.. beat me!'' satirizing police's recent use of violence against ralliers.

Analysts say that the words and phrases written on placards and various Web sites reflect changes in the culture of rallies here, underlining a shift from analog to digital.

``In any country, as democracy improves, protests turn from militant ones to peaceful ones. Rallies are becoming a sort of cultural festival here. We are witnessing a change with this cheerful mood and these funny slogans,'' Yonsei University professor Kim Ho-ki told The Korea Times. ``Parody is one of the most representative forms of postmodernism.''

Seoul National University professor Han Sang-jin said, ``In this modern but risky society where varying interests groups confront each other, parody will become an important ingredient of protests by the younger generation.''

new generation?

2008-06-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

From the Hankyoreh: Protests continue, Rallies draw new generation of protestors. The Korea times has announced that the KCTU is planning a general strike for the 16th but the link is broken. Meanwhile Lee Myung Bak is trying to assuage public discontent but it doesn't seem to be working, even according to the Heritage Foundation, however, the HF seems to want to make the protests sound more like an general anti-US sentiment issue, which is wrong.

Also, a 72 hour long protest begins today. And even mainstream conservative groups have joined the fray.

Some photos from last night's rally

2008-05-31T12:17:00.000-07:00

Ohmynews.com has a number of photos and reports from last nights rally, in Korean. Seems like it was pretty big. Even the BBC reported 100,000.

Some video here at Daum, and here on youtube, some candid remarks from a police captain: "Police chief: Guys, when you hit people, try to avoid being filmed by people, journalists, and reporters. If you got pictured when you hit women and handicapped, cover up each other and try to identify who pictured you.." or so that's what one comment says.

[Update 1], a whole series of news stories here on youtube, and a vast collection of DIY video and others here.

[Update 2], Some more pics from Sunday's rally below and from Ohmynews and from Chamsesang, via Kotaji.

The gusts of popular feeling continue...

Mad cows, stubborn presidents

2008-05-30T10:08:00.000-07:00

I've tried to stay away from the mad cow issue for a while now (both physically and intellectually) because you can read about it everywhere these days, but I thought I would post this article just for those of you who don't compulsively read the Hankyoreh like I do. I think the issue deserves a wider, critical reading which I don't have time to do. [Update: I've elaborated a little bit more on this issue in a reply to anonymous reader Scott on a previous post] Certainly there are those who want to pin it down to anti-americanism but I think the issue is much more complicated than that. Mostly it seems about the attitude of the president and ruling party both to principled negotiation and to protest. Theoretically I'm sure there are just as lax, or worse, safety regulations on some Korean or Chinese or Australian products but that doesn't seem to be the key issue, it's just that government seems so open about accepting a lower standard and repressing opposition to its position by brandishing the opposition as violent or leftists and arresting them. That the government has not realized that most of the people protesting come from a less institutionalized background than the unions or NGOs has really been one of their fatal flaws, nothing creates a generation of activists more than ideologically branding them 'communists' and them putting them in jail as seems to have happened to a number of people from high school students to housewives and retirees over the last few weeks. Oh well, that should provide a welcome antidote for Park Chung Hee nostalgia and further erode LMB's support base. Good work, and done in less than three months in office!

S. Korea resumes U.S. beef imports
Opposition parties still demanding that beef agreement be renegotiated

Minister of Food, Agriculture, Forest and Fisheries Chung Woon-chun on May 29 announced the conditions for the importation of U.S. beef and apologized about the government’s handling of negotiations on the import sanitary terms. The beef agreement was reached with the United States on April 18.

In reaction, opposition parties, including the United Democratic Party, declared to stage outdoor protests to nullify the announcement. Civic organizations are also strongly against the announcement, taking the next step in their fight against the resumption of U.S. beef imports by renewing their protests and continuing to call for renegotiation of the deal.

Chung pledged to step up efforts to fully manage quarantine inspection procedures and beef distribution. The ministry also requested that the Ministry of Public Administration and Security publish the announcement under the name of the related minister via a government newsletter. The newsletter will carry the announcement sometime around June 3.

As a result, Korea will begin importing U.S. beef with few limitations on the age of the animal and the kinds of animal parts allowed into the country, including bone-in meat and intestines.

According to the new import conditions, all animal parts from cattle younger than 30 months old, except for tonsils and the end of the small intestine, will be imported. For beef from cattle older than 30 months, Korea will import all animal parts, with the exclusion of seven specified risk materials known to be at higher risk for mad cow disease, such as back bones.

These changes are quite different from the original rules, which stipulated that only beef from cattle less than 30 months of age would be allowed. South Korea has banned imports of bone-in-beef for four and half years since 2003. U.S. beef imports have been banned completely since last October when bone fragments were found in a shipment of imported meat.

The final announcement contains the full text of the ROK-U.S. beef agreement, with the exchange of letters denoting U.S. recognition of Korea’s quarantine sovereignty attached. The exchange of letters was signed by trade representatives from South Korea and the United States during an additional round of negotiations earlier this month.

In consideration of the people’s concern about the safety of U.S. beef and the effect of the resumption of imports on South Korean livestock farmers, the ministry announced that all of the nation’s restaurants will be required to inform customers of the country of origin of all beef dishes.

Opposition parties and civic groups have renewed their protests against the government’s enforcement of the beef notification and are planning to take further steps to nullify it. The UDP issued a resolution on the same day the ministry made its announcement, saying that the only way to resolve the current crisis and satisfy the people’s demands is for the government to abandon its plan to enforce the notification and immediately begin renegotiations. “If the notification takes effect, we will stage all-out protests to nullify the beef deal,” the UDP said.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]

Politicized Policing

2008-05-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

Yet another post from the Hankyoreh (as you can see my free time has been limited lately). This one comes after yesterday's crackdown on LMB's beef agreement with the US. Lot's of stuff happening which can catch up on through most Korea-related blogs and websites. The crackdown on the protests seems set to provoke a large reaction from the public, but what is perhaps most disturbing about them is the way in which the policing involved reminds many observers of the role of the police in previous dictatorships. Since LMB's election to police have seemingly been reintegrated into the governments political strategy and have been monitoring and interfering with civic groups. The crackdown yesterday signifies the first time that they have shown their face in this new role vis a vis civil society or speech related protests (if one accepts that the authoritarian policing of labour and especially migrants was never fully eliminated).

[Analysis] Lee administration reversing democratic achievements
Infringement on media freedoms tops list of troubling changes made since Lee Myung-bak took office

»[PICTURE] Police drag away citizens who participated in a two-day, sit-in candle vigil to protest the resumption of U.S. beef imports when they try to march toward Cheong Wa Dae at dawn on May 25.

There are growing concerns that the administration of President Lee Myung-bak, who marked his first three months in office on May 25, has reversed some of the democratic progress that Korean society has made. For the first three months, law enforcement authorities, including the police, the prosecution and the Board of Audit and Inspection, have been mobilized to ingratiate themselves with the government’s initiatives. Regular meetings on public security with the National Intelligence Service, which were common under the military-backed government in the early 1980s, have been revived. The terms of the directors of public entities, which are guaranteed by law, have been ignored and an advisory opinion on the rights of migrant workers given by the National Human Rights Commission was overturned by a remark made by President Lee.

In a clear sign of a setback in progress toward democracy, riot police beat protesters and forcefully arrested them in the early morning on May 25 and 26 to disperse a street rally after a candlelight vigil was held to oppose the planned resumption of U.S. beef imports. Democratic achievements, obtained by the Korean people since the pro-democracy uprising in June 1987, have gradually been undermined. Human rights have been suppressed easily enough by intelligence authorities resuming investigations into members of the civilian population. With the government-controlled economic system showing signs of revival, the road to economic democratization has become rockier. Where the law ends, the politics of intervention begins.

Kim Ho-ki, a sociology professor at Yonsei University, who described the government of President Lee as “neo-liberal authoritarian rule,” said it is characteristic of the government to use “neo-liberalism to handle education, employment and welfare policies under market principles, while trying to control civic society and social movements with an authoritarianism similar to that employed during the Yushin (revitalizing reform) regime and the fifth government.” The Yushin regime and the fifth government, which date back to the 1970s and 1980s, constitute one of the darkest chapters in modern South Korean history. At the time, South Korea was ruled by military generals with most the basic rights held in abeyance. “Such a way of ruling is fundamentally opposed to the pluralism brought by the democratic era, so will amplify social unrest and discord,” Kim said.

Of the setbacks democracy has suffered, what’s most worrisome is the government’s attempt to control the media. The Board of Audit and Inspection, the Korea Communications Commission, and other government agencies are engaging in a full out attempt to force Jung Yun-joo, the president of the Korean Broadcasting System, to resign from the post. It is becoming clear that the government is trying to appoint people who are considered as “yes-men” to serve the administration of President Lee at posts in broadcasting, at news wires and media institutions, where the government has an influence on personnel appointments. Nevertheless, conservative media outlets, which had trumpeted the idea that they would protect media freedoms under the liberal governments of the past decade, have kept mum. The cozy relationship between powerful politicians and the conservative media, which put democracy into limbo until the 1980s, has returned.

Kim Hyeong-gi, a professor of economics at Kyungpook National University, said, “During the administration of former President Roh Moo-hyun, (the government) weakened the privileges of the major law enforcement authorities. But the government of President Lee Myung-bak has tended to strengthen its authoritarian rule while promoting the idea of a market economy. This phenomenon has occurred because the country turned conservative before the monitoring of law enforcement authorities by the National Assembly and civil society had taken root, and amid a lack of democratic maturity.”

neo-slavery?

2008-05-26T10:05:00.000-07:00

I found this recent article in the Hankyoreh terribly disturbing:

The Hankyoreh launches campaign to support S. Korea’s foreign brides

More foreign migrant women are getting divorced, only to be bought and sold on an increasingly large domestic marketplace

» Southeast Asian migrant women relax at a shelter in North Gyeongsang Province in early May. An increasing number of foreign brides are getting divorced, only to be sold and purchased for remarriage.

An increasing number of foreign women who have come to Korea as brides are getting divorced. Many of these women are just one step removed from experiencing the same fate as other foreign women before them who have become the victims of violent acts committed by their Korean husbands committed suicide. Their lives are at stake. Sadly, this is just another portrait created by the barbaric acts committed in a society that buys wives for Korean men. In response to this crisis, The Hankyoreh, in conjunction with the Women Migrants Humanrights Center, has launched a campaign to support foreign women living in South Korea. The campaign will run for a month beginning on May 12.

The campaign aims to highlight the lives of migrant women who have come to be divorced in Korea. A considerable number of foreign women who have come to Korea through marriage usually do not return to their home countries and are forced to lead unstable lives, before and after their marriages fail. Many of them get remarried via the services of middlemen looking for a broker’s fee or find work in nightclubs or other places offering low wages.

The story of one 21-year-old Cambodian woman is representative of the increasing number of foreign women who are traded for money. The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, first came to Korea in July 2007, when she was greeted by her new 93-year-old father-in-law, an apple-grower in North Gyeongsang Province, and her 51-year-old husband. Before long, her hopes for a new life turned to despair. Her husband’s shabby house was full of piles of garbage that gave off a disgusting odor. She soon learned that her husband had a mental disorder and he behaved badly whenever he drank, which caused her to flee to a neighbor’s house to escape his drunken tirades. Her father-in-law expressed his regret about the situation, but said he could not let her go because he had paid such a huge sum of money to get his son a wife. He had borrowed ten million won (US$ 9,551) and paid it to a matchmaking service.

One day, a neighbor visited the house and advised the father-in-law to sell the woman for 5 million won. The father-in-law agreed. Another village resident, looking back on the time, said, “As the rumor that the woman would be sold for 5 million won spread, there were many volunteers who offered to take her cheaply.”

A pastor from a neighboring area introduced the father-in-law to a man in his 40s who wanted to take her in, but the clergyman said that the man could not pay more than 500,000 won for her. The woman’s father-in-law demanded a payment of at least 2 million won, but when his offer was rejected, he attempted to take her to his house. The woman panicked and sought help at a center for foreign women in North Gyeongsang Province and in April, she was finally granted a divorce.

Now that she is free, she is getting more marriage proposals. She is in high demand because there are no additional commissions to be paid. The woman, however, still feels uneasy about remarrying in Korea. Han Guk-yeom, a representative of the Women Migrants Humanrights Center, said, “A fundamental problem is that Korean society thinks of migrant women who settle in Korea through marriage as ‘goods.’” They remarry for cheap commissions or get jobs in “places of entertainment.”

Gwon Mi-ju, an official of the center, said, “Many migrant women can be seen at massage parlors or noraebang (singing rooms) in local areas and I think that most of them are divorcees.”

situated authoritarianism

2008-05-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

The government continues its history of completely repressing the MTU and migrants in general. Here is a letter from the latest MTU president, Torner Rimbu, to be arrested and deported by the government in a coordinated crackdown. From the Hankyoreh:

Are migrant workers disposable?

Written by Torner Rimbu, the president of the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrant Trade Union, from the Cheongju Detention Center

My respected Koreans and migrant laborers! I greet you in struggle! They say if you want to be a great person you need to meet great people, and I have met great people like you. I have been unable to become a great activist, but I did my best.

I came to beautiful Korea to escape poverty. But as discrimination towards, and exploitation of, the weak exist everywhere, I gave all my youth wandering about during my difficult life in Korea hoping to realize my Korean Dream, but at no time was I happy.

Korean society changed as time went by, but the oppression and discrimination towards the weak did not. I was unable to receive proper treatment for injuries to my waist, neck, and disk. Once, someone made use of my legal status as an “illegal alien” to commit fraud against me, and, instead of getting legal help, I suffered more. I have worked hard for the sake of the migrant union since that time in 2003. But the biggest crisis for me came when I was fired from my company because of the “employment permit program” that began in August 2004. I had no money and could find no work; the crackdown was intensifying and I had nowhere to go. I came to think that something was wrong, and I thought migrant workers would have to raise their voices. I followed my seonbae (elders) to a sit-in at Myeongdong Cathedral. The slogans at the time were “Stop the deportations!” and “Fully legalize undocumented migrant workers!” During the 386-day sit-in struggle I learned more about Korea, and learned more still from the fine Korean seonbae I met, and their determination to struggle was handed down to me as well. A great many Koreans joined in strong solidarity, giving us much needed strength.

The Korean Ministry of Justice, however, was always out to crush the migrant union and would not let me be. On May 2, 2008, at 8:30 p.m., I fell victim to a targeted arrest operation by more than ten Seoul Immigration Office employees on my way to a candlelight protest against imports of American mad cow beef.

Why does the Korean government want to arrest and deport us? There are some 230,000 undocumented migrant workers in Korea; does it want to deport them all? Are the police and the Ministry of Justice on a joint crackdown operation from May 1 to July 31 because the president ordered it to reduce the number of illegal aliens to zero? (Editor’s note: President Lee Myung-bak said, “We should protect legal foreign laborers, but ban illegal foreign laborers from walking freely,” at a Labor Ministry briefing on March 14.) How many of our migrant worker friends are going to be hurt or killed in the course of this crackdown? If undocumented migrant workers have done anything wrong, then their only sin is having come to Korea and worked hard to achieve their dreams.

But there is still hope. There is hope because of the solidarity of many Korean citizens and migrant workers. Someday, we will meet again and struggle together and work for more ultimate things, for the abolition of all discrimination. I would ask that you afford more proactive interest in our effort, that you support us and offer your solidarity.

They say cowards kneel. They say betrayers betray. But those who are courageous struggle. All of you who have stood with us migrant workers are fine comrades. And you are courageous comrades. I may already have been deported by the time you read this, but I wish you good health. May we meet again.

Torner Rimbu, the president of Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrant Trade Union, was deported to Nepal on May 15.

More on the latest MTU arrests

2008-05-06T11:08:00.001-07:00

From today's Hankyoreh

Migrant Trade Union leaders arrested for holding demonstrations

Latest arrest could be the start of sweeping crackdowns on migrant workers

» Migrant workers hold a demonstration to protest government oppression in the Jongno district, Seoul, on January 20.

The Ministry of Justice announced on May 5 that it had arrested two leaders of the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrant Trade Union, including its president Torner Rimbu, for organizing demonstrations against the government. The MTU is protesting the arrests, saying that the incident is the beginning of a sweeping roundup of foreign workers.

According to the ministry, the two MTU leaders led demonstrations against government policy. The MTU, with the cooperation of other civic groups, have held demonstrations to demand that all immigrants without visas be given legal status and the employment permit system, which allows companies to hire migrant workers only when Korean citizens cannot be found, be abolished. The ministry announced that it would deport the two MTU leaders, both of whom had overstayed their visas. Torner Rimbu became the MTU president after the group’s former president, Kaji Man, was deported in November.

The ministry formed a task force on May 1 and launched the first crackdown on all migrant workers without visas since the inauguration of President Lee Myung-bak in late February. The ministry plans to continue its crackdown for the next three months, and says that it will prevent illegal foreign workers from making inroads into the domestic labor market.

“The target of crackdown is our leaders, the fact that two of our leaders were arrested as soon as the crackdown began proves it,” representatives from the MTU said.

Lee Jeong-won, an MTU official, said that they saw the crackdown coming after the new government began stating that there should be stricter enforcement of the law. The government wanted to remove the MTU leadership ahead of the crackdown on migrant workers, Lee, the MTU official, added.

The MTU also said that dozens of immigration authorities ambushed Rimbu, the MTU president, in order to catch him.

MTU leaders arrested

2008-05-05T12:27:00.000-07:00

The MTU is courageous, but it seems that the frequency with which the government is attacking their leadership is frightening: three sets of leaders in 6 months. The new government seems to have sped up the political repression against politicized migrants even faster than the previous one.

KCTU - Repression against the Migrant Trade Union leadership continues

Repression against MTU Leadership Continues!

The South Korean government has attacked MTU (Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union) once again. On May 2, only one day after workers around the world celebrated May Day, MTU's newly elected president and vice president were forcibly arrested by immigration officers, the president in front of the union office and the vice president at his home. We are deeply enraged by this act of repression against MTU and migrant workers' organizing in South Korea!

Description of the Incident
At roughly 8:20pm on the night of May 2, President Torna Limbu and MTU's vice general secretary were walking out of the MTU office when they were suddenly confronted by 10 to 15 immigration officers who were waiting hidden around the corner. The officers surrounded the president and without presenting a detention order violently forced him into a van waiting nearby. When the vice general secretary attempted to protest he was physically restrained by officers who shouted at him not to interfere with public affairs.

Soon after, at around 9:00pm the same night, union officers become unable to contact MTU Vice President Abdus Sabur. When a union officer and a Korean supporter went to check on him, they found his house empty. A neighbor informed them that immigration officers had been their shortly before. At 12:30am it was confirmed that the vice president had also been arrested and that both men were being transported to Cheongju Detention Center 2.5 hours south of Seoul.

The arrests of both MTU leaders were clearly pre-planned. Immigration officers had followed the president since the previous day when he participated in May Day activities. The vice president recognized a person who had sat nearby him at a fundraiser the week before among the officers who arrested him. That President Torna heard the officers in the van carrying him communicating consistently with those stationed near Vice President Sabur’s house and in other areas in Seoul also shows clearly that the arrests were coordinate with one another.

Long-term Attack on MTU
This outrageous act of repression comes only several months after the targeted crackdown against MTU leadership on November 27 of last year in which the former president, vice president and general secretary were all arrested. In the wake of that attack MTU, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and supporters from the labor movement and civil society carried out a 99-day sit-in protest calling for an end to the oppression against migrants and migrant organizing and at the same time rebuilt MTU. On April 6, MTU elected a new leadership, with President Torna at the forefront, and moved forward determined to fight the crackdown against undocumented migrant workers and win migrant workers' labor and human rights.

The new conservative government of Lee Myeong-bak, however, has only strengthened the policy of repression against migrant workers. A mass crackdown against undocumented migrant workers has again begun and Lee Myeong-bak has stated that he will not tolerate undocumented migrant workers' unionizing.

Supreme Court Case
Lee Myeongbak’s statement is a direct reflection of the attitude the South Korean government has taken towards MTU since its founding in 2005. At that time the Ministry of Labor rejected MTU’s official union status, claiming that undocumented migrant workers do not have the right to freedom of association and union activities. MTU carried out a legal battle against this decision and eventually won in the Seoul High Court on 1 February 2007. However this verdict was appealed to the Supreme Court, where a decision is expected to be reached by the middle to end of this year. The Ministry of Labor bases its appeal on the claims that the right of undocumented migrant workers to freedom of association is not protected in the South Korean Constitution or stated clearly in international law. However, we know that workers are workers, entitled to the same labor rights, no matter what country they reside in under what visa status. This was clearly shown in the High Court decision, which ruled that undocumented migrant workers are the subjects of equal labor rights under South Korean law and in rulings of the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association (UGT [2001], AFL-CTM [2002]) and the Inter-America Court of Human Rights (17 Sept. 2003), which show that international law protects the union rights of undocumented migrant workers.

Stop the Repression!
The arrests of President Torna, Vice President Sabur and previous union leadership, and the South Korean government’s refusal to recognize MTU’s legal union status are clearly an attempt to break MTU's opposition to oppressive policies towards migrant workers. This repression is not only against MTU, but against migrant workers’ organizing in general and, indeed, the entire labor movement.

Despite the attacks, MTU stands unwaivering in our opposition to the crackdown against undocumented migrant workers and in our position that migrant workers, regardless of their visa status, are entitled to equal labor and human rights. We therefore make the following demands:

1. Stop the repression against MTU and release President Torna Limbu and Vice President Abdus Sabur immediately!
2. In the name of the right to freedom of association of all workers, recognize MTU’s legal union status!
3. Stop the crackdown against legalize all undocumented migrant workers!

Call for Solidarity
Ours is a fight not only for migrant workers in South Korea but for migrant workers all over the world. Therefore, once more, we ask for your support. Please show your solidarity in the following ways.

1. Organize a solidarity protest in front of the South Korean embassy or consulate in your area.
2. Send a protest letter in your organization’s name to the South Korean Ministry of Justice and Commissioner of Korea Immigration Service. (See the example letter below, please send to all the fax numbers given)
3. Encourage your members and networks to sign the online petition at this link: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/StopMigrantRepression/.
4. Please send us a copy of protest letter and a word of any actions you take and pictures if possible. inter@kctu.org , mtuintl@jinbo.net

Let’s struggle together for the rights of all workers!

Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants Trade Union
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions

--------------------
Sample Protest Letter

Ministry of Justice, Republic of Korea
Building 1, Gwacheon Government Complex,
Jungang-dong 1, Gwacheon-si, Gyeonggi-do
Republic of Korea
Fax: 82-2-2110-3079

Commissioner of Korean Immigration Service
Fax: 82-2-500-9059, 82-2-500-9128, 82-2-500-9026

To the South Korean Minister of Justice Kim Gyeong-han:

We, the ___________(organization’s name), write to express grave concern and outrage at the recent arrests of the President and Vice President of the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union (MTU). We see this attack as an assault not only against MTU but against the migrant workers movement and labor movement worldwide.

On the evening of May 2, only one day after May Day, MTU President Torna Limbu and Vice President Abdus Sabur, were arrested at separate places between 8:20 and 9:20pm. The President was coming out of the MTU office with the MTU Vice General Secretary when they were suddenly confronted by 10 to 15 immigration officers who were waiting hidden around the corner. The officers surrounded the president and without presenting a detention order violently forced him into a van waiting nearby. When the vice general secretary attempted to protest he was physically restrained by officers who shouted at him not to interfere with public affairs.

Soon after, 10 to 15 immigration officers banged on door of Vice President Sabur’s residence, entered and forcibly arrested him. Both men were transported that night to Cheongju Detention Center 2.5 hours south of Seoul. These arrests were clearly preplanned and carefully carried out in an attempt to stop MTU’s rightful union activities. Even more maddening, they come only several months of a similar attack against MTU’s leadership in which the previous president, vice president and general secretary were arrested and later deported at the end of last year.

We are aware that this targeted crackdown against MTU’s leadership coincides with the pending Supreme Court Case concerning MTU’s legal union status. We are concerned that despite a Seoul High Court Ruling on 1 February 2007 in favor of MTU, the Supreme Court decision, most likely to come out in the middle or end of this year, may deny South Korean migrant workers’ right to freedom of association, in contradiction with South Korean and International Law. We wish to assert that all workers, regardless of their visa status or the country in which they reside, are entitled to equal labor rights, including the right to form and participate in trade unions.

The arrests of President Torna, Vice President Sabur and previous union leadership, and the South Korean government’s refusal to recognize MTU’s legal union status are clearly an attempt to break MTU's opposition oppressive policies towards migrant workers. We see this not only as repression against MTU, but as repression against migrant workers’ organizing and the labor movement worldwide.

We therefore make of you the following demands:

1. Stop the repression against MTU and release President Torna Limbu and Vice President Abdus Sabur immediately!
2. In the name of the right to freedom of association of all workers, recognize MTU’s legal union status!
3. Stop the crackdown against legalize all undocumented migrant workers!

Sincerely,

___________________
(name, title, organization)

Lee Changgeun
International Executive Director
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions
Tel.: +82-2-2670-9234 Fax: +82-2-2635-1134
E-mail: inter@kctu.org Web-site : http://kctu.org
2nd Fl. Daeyoung Bld., 139 Youngdeungpo-2-ga, Youngdeungpo-ku, Seoul 150-032 Korea

Opportunity amidst division?

2008-05-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

My good friend Cho Hee Yeon was in today's Hankyoreh;

Reform and reconciliation top agenda of progressive party forum
Progressive parties are tasked with finding new ways to reignite voters’ desire for social change

The Korea Labor and Society Institute hosted a forum on April 30 to mark the 13th anniversary of its foundation. The forum was aimed at assessing the achievement and future development of Korean-style progressive party politics, and officials from both progressive opposition parties attended. The Democratic Labor Party and the New Progressive Party split in January, just before the April 19 parliamentary election. The DLP won just five seats in the election, whereas the NPP was unable to gain any seats in the country’s unicameral 299-seat National Assembly.

In his keynote speech, Park Sang-hun, the chief executive of the publishing company Humanitas, said the two progressive parties had poor results in the April vote because of their lack of leadership and the perception that progressives were ignoring politics altogether. Citing Max Weber’s remark that democracy without leaders would result in a domination of certain factions within political parties, rather than strengthening the power of the general public, Park said, “The reason why the political influence of the progressive parties has faded away is not because of factions, but an unlimited tolerance of factional feuding due to a lack of strong leadership. South Korea’s progressive parties have insisted on rejecting the model of leadership in which a political party is represented as a person. For the progressive parties to become more politically powerful, it is urgent to build a leadership that responds to social demands.”

In addition, Park said, progressive politicians have only pretended to have kept their distance from power politics, though they have actually been involved in such politics. As they have continued to do these things over and over again, it has prompted them to think about “who should take more moral responsibility.” As a result, it has forced the progressive parties to continue to lose supporters, Park said. “In that sense, it’s a natural consequence that the progressive force was recently split in two and reported poor political results.”

At the forum, Cho Hee-yeon, a sociology professor at SungKonghoe University, said there is a window of opportunity for progressive politics against the regime of neo-liberalism, after the landslide win by the ruling Grand National Party in the April election. Cho encapsulated “anti-neo-liberalist politics” as “radical politics for livelihood protections,” saying the progressive parties should present alternative proposals on housing, public health, medical service, education and life after retirement. In the April election, many low-income people voted for GNP candidates mainly because of campaign pledges related to “new town” apartment construction projects. Cho called low-income voters’ support of the “new town” plans an expression of a “desire for imitation,” explaining that voters wanted to copy the success of those who became rich during the 1970s-80s, when military-backed governments put the economy ahead of democracy. “The task for progressive politics is how to turn the desire for imitation into a desire for livelihood protections,” Cho said.

Cho also proposed that the DLP and NPP forge a “non-hostile relationship of conflict.” Cho, who opposed the split, said, “I hope the split will be an opportunity for the two factions to find a way to appreciate each other’s agenda. I think that the progressive party split should bring internal reforms that were difficult under the factional divisions of the past.”

300 days into the Eland strike

2008-04-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

As the Hankyoreh reported last week:

The labor union of E-Land marked the 300th day of its strike on April 17. With no breakthrough in sight, Kim Gyeong-wook, the head of the E-Land union, expressed a sense of frustration, saying, “The E-Land dispute will only end if the union dies or the company dies.”

Since the strike began in June, the union and management have met several times, but the two sides have failed to narrow the gaps in key issues such as job security for part-time workers, rehiring of fired union workers and punishment of striking workers. Intermittent negotiations between the union and management were stalled again since early April. (link)

Cina has posted a video chronicling the strike in recent months as well as some more useful links and photos.

Readings

2008-04-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

Let the revenge begin, and send your elderly to work while you are at it: Leading Business groups propose worker protections be slashed.

The heritage foundation deconstructs Lee Myung Bak's supposed pragmatism for what it is: conservatism, and the Heritage foundation hope to celebrate this fact.

Seems I missed these two other stories (thanks to IKTU for posting them), the first is about plans by Lee Myung Bak to raid the pension system to pay back defaulted credit card debt. The second is on some of his plans for education.

Mental stress and labour-management relations

2008-04-08T12:19:00.000-07:00

From today's Hankyoreh:

Historic court ruling classifies mental problems as occupational hazard: Employees subjected to discriminatory treatment, were separated from their peers and put under surveillance

A South Korean court ruled that 12 employees of a local company were suffering from an occupational hazard. The ruling, which said that the mental problems, including depression, suffered by the workers were symptomatic of the company’s discriminatory treatment and its surveillance of their union activities. This is the first time labor-management disputes have been acknowledged as a source of work-related stress and mental illness labeled as an occupational hazard.

On April 7, Seoul Administrative Court Judge Ham Jong-sik ruled in favor of the 12 employees of Hitec RCD Korea Inc., a maker of electronics parts. The 12 workers filed suit against the state-run Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service after the government agency refused to pay for the costs associated with their medical treatment.

In the ruling, the court said: “The union members were seen as being under significant stress because the company monitored and controlled them via closed-circuit televisions and deployed them to separate production lines. The court acknowledges that their mental problems were caused by discriminatory treatment.”

The dispute between the unionized workers of Hitec RCD Korea and the management began in 2002. The workers launched hunger strikes and partial walkouts, after which the company shut down the factory and took legal action against them. In February 2003, the company fired five of the workers, including union leader Kim Hye-jin, alleging they had obstructed the work of the company and other employees. Some of the union members returned to work after the strike, but the company subjected them to discriminatory treatment, separating them from other employees by stationing them at separate production lines. In certain cases, the company gave its employees money so that they could participate in a company picnic; the unionized workers were not allowed to receive this money, though other employees were. As part of the dispute, the workers sued the company for illegally monitoring them via closed-circuit televisions; the company was forced to remove four of the cameras being used for this purpose.

As the labor-management dispute escalated, the unionized workers continued to be threatened with blackmail and slander, and many said that they felt they were “always under surveillance.” They filed a petition with the Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service to get medical treatment for stress-related symptoms, but the government agency rejected the petition, saying, “There is no relationship between work and labor-management relations.”

While the court has now ruled in favor of the workers, it seems that they still have a long way to go. Kim, the company’s union leader, said, “The unionized workers, including the five whom the Supreme Court ruled had illegally been fired, haven’t been returned to their original work stations as the company has split the production line into a separate entity.”

same old same old

2008-04-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

Well, after yesterday's surprising post, it's back to good old fashioned divisive, conflict generating policies:

New law revision could weaken unions’ right to strike

Despite objections from labor community, Justice Ministry attempts to limit voting on strikes, the Ministry of Justice is pushing ahead with a revision of laws to prevent trade unions from voting to go on strike until after a breakdown in labor-management negotiations occurs. The labor community, however, objects to the move, saying that the new law will limit the constitutional right to strike and disrupt voluntary labor-management negotiations.

The ministry announced on April 3, that it is considering a proposal to the Labor Ministry that would revise the related laws on the timing of when unions go on strike. Under the new law, unions would not be allowed to vote to strike until after labor-management negotiations break down completely. The existing laws state that walkouts should be decided by a majority vote within a union, but there is no mention about when the vote is to be conducted.

Lee Geum-ro, an official of the Justice Ministry, said, “In many cases, trade unions vote on a strike to pressure a company before collective bargaining begins. The ministry will survey cases from other countries and then propose that the Labor Ministry revise the related laws.” The ministry has begun reviewing all of the labor laws, according to the official.

In response, the labor community urged the government to discontinue the plan, saying that the new laws could infringe upon the Constitution and worsen labor-management conflicts.

Gwon Du-seop, a lawyer with the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, one of South Korea’s umbrella labor organizations, said that the issue of putting restrictions on the timing of when a vote to strike should take place was briefly discussed when a road map for labor-management relations was under review in September 2006, but the Tripartite Commission did not adopt it because it would severely limit laborers’ right to strike. “I don’t understand why the Justice Ministry is raising the same issue again,” added Gwon.

Woo Moon-sook, the spokeswoman of the KCTU, said, “In reality, employers tend to avoid or conduct unbalanced negotiations, even if labor unions stage walkouts in situations such as what happened with E-Land or Koscom. If the right to strike, which is a laborer’s last resort, is restricted, the basic rights of laborers will inevitably be violated.”

Korea’s other, major umbrella labor union, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, said, “Even if laborers decide to stage a strike, in most cases, they cancel the strike after negotiating with the management. If they can vote only after negotiations have failed, conflicts may be aggravated because the eleventh-hour dialogue between labor and management has been blocked.”

not a terribly bad idea?

2008-04-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

This one is going to be a first. I actually agree some aspects of one policy of the new regime, just one so far, though. This would be one of the few actual 'pragmatic' plans that it has beyond the reckless, crisis prone policies that he also seems set to unveil. This is the plan to use Nonghyup's profits to pay off the debts of some farmers. The principle here that I support would be that the National Farmers Cooperative is actually run like a cooperative and not a profit-making business. However, plans shouldn't merely be forced onto it and there should be more protections and socialization of costs at different levels of governance that compliment the kind of relief highlighted here.

Gov't pushing to ease farmers' debt burden

The government is pushing to introduce a new agriculture equipment leasing system to help ease the farmers' debt burden, a senior policymaker said on Thursday.

The plan calls for the state-supported National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (Nonghyup) to use profits generated through its banking operations to help alleviate debt incurred by farmers who have bought equipment such as combines, tractors and rice transplanters.

Minister for Food and Agriculture Chung Woon-chun said Nonghyup posts profits of 1.2-1.3 trillion (US$1.23-1.33 billion) won every year that could be diverted to help relieve some of the 1.2 trillion won in debt incurred by farmers from buying equipment.

The official said in talks with the cooperative's managers in Seoul that a leasing arrangement would be a feasible means to reduce debt, while at the same time not hurting the ability to raise crops.

"Nonghyup could buy farm equipment from farmers and then lease it back to those who need it," Chung said. The size of the purchase would be determined by the size of the debt of individual farming households.

He added that such support is in accordance with the cooperative's goal of helping farmers.

The minister said that measures are underway to ascertain exact levels of debt, with a detailed blueprint on how best to push for the new system to be announced at the end of the month.

Using farm equipment is essential for mass production, but because of steep prices, small farms are unable to generate enough money to pay back loans used to buy the equipment.

Nonghyup officials said they will try to make changes that will allow the purchase of farm equipment and the start of a leasing program, although some reservations have been raised.

Insiders said that while the agriculture ministry thinks the cooperative generates more than 1 trillion won worth of profit every year, a lot of this must be set aside to meet the capital adequacy ratio set by the Bank for International Settlements.

Of the total, about 650 billion won is reserved for capital adequacy and support projects. It said another 140 billion won is used as dividends for regional cooperatives which are shareholders of the nationwide organization.

This, it said, leaves around 400 billion won available for the leasing equipment, with even this amount unlikely to be used entirely because of the need to maintain emergency relief reserves.

neoliberal left, neoliberal right; or, market friendly left, chaebol friendly right?

2008-04-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

Two stories in the Hankyoreh highlight a tension that I've seen coming for a while and which I have felt cautious about in my own writing here and elsewhere. That is the difference between the Roh and Lee regimes on economic policy. Undoubtedly, the Roh regime focused on trade and labour liberalization, corporate governance restructuring (in favor of shareholders and accountability), as well as some financial liberalization. Roh's policies were certainly 'market friendly' in a neo-liberal sense: a notion of the market best approximated by the neo-classical ideal of a free market of small and medium sized firms in perfect competition.

Now, Lee also claims that his policies are market friendly but that he is focusing on competition first. In other words he favors the domestic conglomerates and proposes to do away not just with rules designed to enhance transparency and competition in the way highlighted above but the very supervisory role of the state in guaranteeing the rules under which that competition takes place. Or so I gander from two recent articles in the Hankyoreh on the restructuring of the Fair Trade Commission and the Banking sector: changes to both reflect a rather reckless 'let the chaebol own what they want' attitude with none of the regulatory requirements of past regimes, including the dictatorships that Lee and others like him saw as rational economic planners who used state power to channel finance to industrial development -- that is not what is going on here.

Kim Jin-bang, a senior activist with the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy and a professor at Inha University, blamed the FTC for “Its plan to ease regulations, despite a lack of plans for supervisions and punishments, which shows that (the FTC) may sit idly by if the market collapses.”

I guess the irony here is that the left, often cursed for the 'lost decade' of slowed growth since the 1997 crisis and criticised for being ideological (a la socialism) were actually better neo-liberals in the sense that their neoliberalism was more attached to actual economic ideals -- ones which I myself am very critical of as I see no invisible hand to economic life and worry about the forms of power masked by such rhetoric. Meanwhile the right seem not simply pragmatic -- as in 'let's see what works' -- in their policy choices but just corrupt and after power for their friends in ways that might be much more dangerous to the economy, environment and society in the long term. Similar issues to these are mirrored, I suppose, in the continued controversy over the new right's 'textbook' of revisions of the historical record and their shinning appraisals of past colonial and dictatorial regimes.

progressive options

2008-03-22T02:30:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting editorial from the Hankyoreh:

[Column] A politics for all 100%
Kim Yeong-ok, Research professor, Ewha Womans University Korean Women’s Institute

» Professor Kim Yeong-ok

I happened upon the blog of Choi Hyun-sook (http://blog.naver.com/bebreaking), Korea’s first “sexual minority” candidate for the National Assembly, and lost myself for hours. I forgot about the passing of time as I looked through her entries and deep into where the tags led me, and it was a most enjoyable excursion. I happened upon a video, taken March 8, of Choi speaking at an International Women’s Day event in front of Seoul City Hall, full of delight and passion. As if trying to offset the heavy seriousness that comes with talking about turning minorities into a political force to reckon with, she ran all about the plaza with a smile on her face.

The reason it looked more powerful and refreshing was also because there are increasing concerns about feminism today. Some people say the movement shrank rapidly after the long goal of doing away with the hoju system, the “head of household system,” in 2005, or that there is resistance from a kind of “anti-feminism,” or that the “public base of operations” that was the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family is being shrunk to being just the Ministry of Gender Equality, and the assessment is that it has become more difficult to do anything, even before we had the chance to do anything politically.

Diagnoses such as these show you how feminism is in a difficult position lately, but they are not surprising. Anti-feminist resistance and feminist pursuits have always been in a contentious relationship, and the fact the body of the movement has shrunk indicates that its agenda has diversified, and that there are separate movements according to goals particular to locale or issue. It is clearly a major event to have the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family shrunk in size and name, to be called the Ministry of Gender Equality. There are major concerns that the accomplishments of feminism could also be downsized or disappeared. (One example would be signs there might be a revival of the allowance for additional points for previous military service in the hiring of employees.)

Feminism tries to read the ways of thinking and behavior of the mainstream, from the perspective of being a minority. First and foremost, feminism’s efforts to disseminate a broad perspective of gender equality and sensibility are accomplished by building solidarity with like-minded people and engaging in sustained dialogue with those who think differently. As noted by Chantal Mouffe, that which is political speaks basically of a situation of conflict between opposing ideas that cannot be combined. It is important to, instead of stubbornly trying to erase the differences between opposing ideologies, agonize politically over ways to coexist by honest recognition of those differences.

It is with this view that the upcoming National Assembly election presents some very politically interesting points. It is very meaningful that Park Young-hee, who has spent the last decade campaigning for the rights of disabled women, will be a proportional representative candidate of the New Progressive Party, and that a woman from the Philippines will be a proportional representative candidate for the Creative Korea Party. I do not think of these women as strategic candidates, there for show or as assistants. It is a reflection of the fact that Korean society has changed, that the “alternative perspective” provided by feminism is winning approval from regular citizens whether people realize it or not, at least to the point where women such as these can stand on the center stage of politics. Park notes that, for feminists, the social movement and electoral politics perhaps can no longer be separate things. The more your group is a minority, the more important this philosophy becomes.

Park was a “good disabled girl” who never challenged anyone and became a “vicious and ferocious disabled feminist activist,” while Choi makes coming out a major part of her political agenda. Both stress the need for a sense of responsibility among their supporters. When this becomes political and evolves into a form of solidarity, it will mean a politics that goes beyond the limits of representative, elected politics. I am truly, very curious to see what it looks like when Choi, Park and the woman from the Philippines propose, and then implement, a politics that “is for 100 percent of the population instead of 1 percent.”

What's that I smell? Authoritarianism?

2008-03-20T13:56:00.000-07:00

It smells a bit like tear gas...

From today's Hankyoreh
[Editorial] Trading Public Safety for Law and Order

The prosecution and the police are speaking with the same voice on the need to “establish law and order.” Yesterday, the Ministry of Justice, in a regular report to the president, said it would emphasize establishing law and order and reviving the economy. The police say they are going to make sure a tone of law and order “takes root.” They talk also about common public safety, but by the looks of it, things are slanted towards the political.

The government’s posture here is very dangerous. The justice ministry says it is going to actively intervene in illegal or politically-motivated strikes in their early stages and thoroughly pursue organizers and have them prosecuted. It also said it would excuse from responsibility all “legitimate” use of police power. The police are already saying they are going to create brigades of riot police that act as arrest teams at protest sites. This is reminiscent of the “Baekgoldan,” the “white skull corps” of President Chun Doo-hwan’s Fifth Republic.

Connect the dots and you see that these are the hard-line answers of two decades ago. It is clearly going to lead to the kinds of police abuses and excessive suppression of assemblies that lead to unfortunate mishaps and intense confrontations as people respond to such events in protest. Democratization broke that cycle, but now, twenty years later, we are returning to the mess of yesteryear? This recklessness that has its eyes closed to history is saddening. One worries even more that this kind of government response will be used as a way to stifle opposition to various current issues such as the Grand Korean Waterway. It threatens the constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of assembly, protest and expression.

A bigger concern is that these measures are mainly targeting laborers. A case in point is a government plan to revise labor laws. Under the revisions, the police will have the power of the prosecution to quell illegal strikes and illegal demonstrators will be subject to both criminal and civil punishment. Various trade unions have already lost influence because of searches, arrests and lawsuits for extraordinary damages. If the government’s plan is realized, the activities of the labor unions will be weakened even further. The government, meanwhile, will reconfigure labor laws to favor businesses, and is likely to make companies less responsible for various illegal acts. In this way, the government will suppress one side while supporting the other, aggravating labor-management conflicts.

It would be natural to assume, then, that the government’s focus on law and order will lead to a neglect of public safety. The police will have to monitor labor unions and chase illegal strikers, while at the same time carrying out its regular function of protecting the general public. If the president and the leaders of justice organizations become concerned about law and order, the police will also have to concentrate on that. The government will do nothing to ease civilian anxieties by paying lip service to public safety. The government should change its direction as soon as possible.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]

Suicides of part-time lecturers

2008-03-16T14:33:00.000-07:00

Hyejin Kim at Global Voices online has interesting piece up about the exploitation of part-time academic labour, in my mind a global issue. (Part time lecturers here in Canada make 5ooo $cdn per course taught. At my school, teaching assistants are unionized but part-time lecturers are not, thus it is more profitable to T.A. a course as the full time rate is also 5000; the amount of work is strictly regulated and often less than half of what the instructor works.)

Part-time lecturers teach 40 percent of all college classes in Korea. But their treatment is the worst of irregular jobs. Other part-time job employees receive 50-55 percent of the salary of the same regular jobs, but part-time lecturers receive less than 1/3.

The lecture fee of the part-time lecturers at national and state universities is about 40,000 won (US 40 dollars) per hour. A lecturer who teaches western art at Seoul National University said, “last semester, I taught a three hour class and received 420,000 won (US 420 dollars) per month.”

Employment is extremely unstable. A part-time lecturer at a private college said, “In the new semester, if the school calls me, then I can teach. Otherwise my contract is done. A research assistant informs us by phone.” Kim Dong Ae (62) who leads a part-time lecturer labor union said, “if the salary doesn’t come on time and I call the administration, they answer why we bug them with such tiny money. We have to put up with this unequal treatment, but nowhere can we complain about it.”

Here's the link to the article if you want read more.

International Women's Day

2008-03-11T23:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a story from a few days ago about Int'l Women's Day.

Gender Equality Still Has Far to Go in Korea

By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

In Korea, just the fact of being a woman already implies several disadvantages one has to bear, an official of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), said.

There are still countless problems facing female employees in the country and they aren't just fighting for perks ― they are just asking for basic living rights, said KCTU spokesman Oh Moon-sook.

``In some small-sized companies, a 10-year-experienced female gets paid a million won a month despite having to work extended hours and sometimes being forced to work under bad working conditions resulting in poor health conditions often leading to a miscarriage. In many cases, they are outsourced workers who aren't guaranteed basic insurance or medical care,'' she said.

Today marks the 100th International Women's Day designated by the United Nations.

In 1908, 15,000 woman workers cried out for women's rights on the streets of New York when 146 female workers died in a fire that occurred at a clothing company. It ignited calls for a better working environment and social treatment for women.

However, 100 years later, there are still in many countries women suffering maltreatment at the hands of men in workplace and home. They say though the economy as a whole may have risen, social prejudice toward women is only being diminished very slowly.

The KCTU as well as some other civic groups said women are hired mostly in non-permanent positions and get promoted less than their male peers.

The groups plan to hold protests in downtown Seoul requesting the government and society to acknowledge the problems they have. Attention will be drawn to such matters as KTX bullet train attendants' employment, where a lot of woman are employed on a part time basis, E-Land clerks' repositioning, and the poor treatment of cleaning ladies.

According to the Seoul City government, the wage gap between the sexes is quite large. Women get paid only 64 percent that of men while they put double the time in home management.

Further research by the Democratic Labor party showed that female non-permanent workers get paid a mere 40 percent of that of male permanent workers.

The reality lets women down and makes it hard for them to live an ``ordinary'' life. ``Being sandwiched among the soaring market price, high education fees, hectic working schedule and others puts me off from having children and other ordinary family life some times,'' Park Chung-wha, an English teacher at a private institution, said.

Another married woman Chung Sun-ae had to give up getting a job because she was married and ``had the possibility of having children.'' She actually had a child later, which kept her occupied all day long. ``I have a master's degree. I hope I can use it some day,'' she said.

There are some signs of improvement however. The Ministry of Labor said the employment rate of females between 15 and 64 has gone up about 10 percentage points in 12 years, from 43.6 percent to 53.1 percent.

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family was established in 2005 and survived the Lee Myung-bak administration's government reorganization plan, thanks to public understanding that gender equality in the country still has a long way to go.

To mark the International Women's Day, a commemorative event will be held at Seoul Plaza. The event will feature plays and concerts.

``We will work till both genders are treated equally ― no more domestic violence or sexual violence, childcare problems and others. We are pretty positive that we can find our way there,'' one of the organizers said.

International solidarity with migrant workers in Korea

2008-02-29T23:05:00.000-08:00

Here is an article from earlier this month from the MTU's tireless solidarity coordinator Wol-san Liem, it is posted over at the immigrant solidarity network site.

The Migrant Workers’ Struggle in South Korea and International Solidarity

Wol-san Liem
International Solidarity Coordinator, Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union

February 9, 2008

1. Introduction
As the issue of immigration has come to center stage in policy debate in the United States over the last several years, grassroots organizations, NGOs and labor unions have put forth strong calls for increased rights form immigrants, pathways to citizenship and an end to raids and deportations. While organizing, public education and lobbying efforts have been lively, however, as with many movements in the U.S., discussion of the issue’s international dimension has been relatively lacking. In fact, the issues of immigration policy reform and undocumented immigrants/migrants are central to countries across Europe and Asia. At the same time struggles against raids and deportations and for immigrant/migrant workers’ labor and human rights are growing in many of these countries. Of these, the struggle in South Korea is significant for the central role played by undocumented migrant workers organizing as part of the labor movement.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the U.S. immigrant rights movement to the migrant workers movement in South Korea. It focuses on the development and current work of the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union, a union build by and for migrant workers regardless of visa status, whose entire leadership is made up of undocumented migrant workers. It also covers the heavy government repression against MTU and ends with a call for solidarity actions in timing with the commemoration of a tragic detention center fire in February of last year and, more widely, greater international solidarity in the immigrant/migrant workers movement worldwide.

II. Background
There are currently roughly 400,000 migrant workers living in South Korea who work in a number of industries, in particular manufacturing and construction, and in services such as restaurants and entertainment. While their numbers may seem small compare to those in the United States, it must be remembered that the history of the current labor migration to South Korea is only twenty-years old, and the country has traditionally implemented strict policies concerning inward migration and long term settlement. In addition, the numbers are steadily rising and migrant workers have become centrally important to the South Korean economy, particularly in specific industries. Migrant workers come from nearly 100 countries including China (Chinese and Chinese of Korean origin), Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bangladesh, Nepal, and West African countries. While conditions, of course, vary depending on industry, country of origin, gender and visa status, migrant works in general face low wages, poor working conditions, ill-treatment at the hands of employers and racism and discrimination from society at large.

Migrant workers first began coming to South Korea in the 1980s, when small and middle-sized manufacturing, construction and other companies began to experience severe labor shortages. Migrant workers, most of whom entered South Korea on tourist or other short-term visas, began to fill this need for additional manpower. Because of the economic necessity, the South Korean government condoned and even encouraged the influx of migrant workers through relaxation of immigration procedures after the 1988 Olympics even before drawing up a formal policy to regulate migrant labor. Eventually, the government developed and implemented the Industrial Trainee System, which brought migrants to South Korea as ‘trainees’ as a way to skirt labor laws concerning wages and work conditions, in order to provide cheap and regulated migrant labor to companies experiencing shortages. This system was severely critiqued by civil society for causing vast abuses of human and labor rights and leading to an increase of undocumented migrants. Negative public opinion forced a change in the system. As such, the government implemented the Employment Permit System (EPS) in 2003, claiming it would protect migrant workers’ rights. This is, however, far from the truth.

III. Employer Permit System
The EPS is currently the main system governing migrant labor in South Korea. While unlike the Trainee System, it does legally acknowledges migrant workers as 'workers', it is in fact designed to preserve the benefits business owners received from the previous system by creating a labor force that is cheap and exploitable.

Under the EPS, migrant workers are prohibited from changing their workplaces at will. If a migrant worker wants to change to another job, he/she must obtain consent from his/her employer and apply to the Ministry of Labor. This process is very difficult for many workers, especially because employers are sometimes unwilling to release their employees. What is more, migrant workers are only allowed to change workplaces three times, except in exceptional circumstances. As such, many migrant workers are stuck at companies where they face unsafe working conditions, low or unpaid wages and inhumane treatment. Female migrant workers are often effectively trapped with employers who sexually harass or abuse them. In addition, because migrant workers are required to renew their contracts each year of the three-year period of the three-year residence period allowed them, they become completely subordinated to the will of their employers, making the exercise of labor rights completely impossible. Finally the sort term 3-year residence period is often not long enough to make enough money to pay off debts incurred during migration and save money to support families back home. The EPS system has, as such, also received strong criticism from human rights, social movement and labor organizations in South Korea and the attention of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants.

IV. Undocumented Migrant Workers and the Current Crackdown
There are over 200,000 undocumented migrant workers in South Korea, more than half of the total population of migrant workers. Many migrant workers have become undocumented by overstaying their visas. This is often inevitable because low-wages make it impossible for migrant workers to save enough money to pay off debts or support their families. Migrant workers may also become undocumented because they are forced to flee difficult conditions at their legally registered workplaces. It is clear that in addition to being an effect of war and neoliberal globalization, which have created situations of unemployment and poverty in migrant-sending countries and vast inequality between nations, the high percent of undocumented migrant workers in South Korea is a direct result of the government misguided policy governing the migrant labor force.

While acknowledging undocumented migrants as a serious social problem, the government has made no effort to find a root-level solution. Instead it has, since 2003, carried out a brutal policy of crackdown and deportation against undocumented migrant workers. This, however, has done nothing to reduce their numbers, which continued to increase after the EPS was implemented. Most recently, a mass joint crackdown (carried out by the Ministry of Labor, the Immigration Authorities and the police) was carried out from August to December in 2007 during which thousands were arrested. What is more, the crackdown, which, like raids in the U.S., is carried out using brutal and results in the imprisonment of migrants in detention center that are no better than prisons, has been the result of 100s of deaths and injuries. The most tragic of this was a fire that broke out at Yeosu Foreigners’ Detention Center on February 11, 2007 killing 10 migrant workers and wounding dozens of others. This event received international attention and also became a catalyst for more unified work between migrant organizations.

The truth is the South Korean economy, like the U.S. economy, needs the labor of undocumented migrant workers, and the government is well aware of this. The recent intense crackdown should, then, not be seen as an effort to solve the undocumented migrant problem in entirety, but instead to reduce the number of undocumented migrants (at 230,000 before August 2007), to the level of estimated need. The crackdown is also clearly a fear tactic used to keep documented migrant workers from leaving their assigned workplaces.

4. Migrant Worker Organizing and the Migrants’ Trade Union
Migrant workers have not been passive in the face of the oppression they face in South Korea, and it is in their resistance that MTU’s history is found. Since soon after they began arriving, migrant workers have come together in communities and formed community organizations in order to aid each other in confronting the difficulties they face. After several years of organizing in this fashion and working in alliance with Korean organizations, migrant workers came together with Korean activists to discuss the formation of a union, the result of which was the founding of the Migrants’ Branch of the Equality Trade Union (ETUMB) in 2002. The activities of ETUMB culminated in a sit-in protest at the Myeongdong Cathedral, a historic site of the South Korean democracy and labor movement, calling for an end to the crackdown and deportations and critiquing the EPS. The sit-in began in November of 2003 and continued for 380 days. In the course of this struggle, migrant worker activist came to believe in the importance of forming an independent union by and for migrant workers themselves. As such, these activists came together with migrant community organizations to form the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union on 24 April 2005. MTU is the first independent labor union in which all officers, beginning with the president, are migrant workers.

5. Labor Repression
Since its establishment MTU has faced continuous repression from the South Korea government. MTU’s notification of union establishment was rejected by the Ministry of Labor on the basis that its leadership was made up of undocumented migrant workers without the same legally protected labor rights as Korean workers. The Ministry of Labor’s rejection initially upheld in a district court, but then overturned by the Seoul Supreme Court on 1 February 2007, which ruled that the right of migrant workers to freedom of association is protected under the South Korean Constitution, regardless of their visa status. Refusing to give up, the Ministry of Justice has appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, where a final ruling is still pending.
In addition to this legal process, the South Korean government has also carried out a targeted crackdown against MTU’s leadership in an attempt to stop the union’s activities. MTU’s first president was arrested in a targeted crackdown, soon after the union’s founding and held in a detention center for nearly a year before he was finally released for medical reasons. During the joint crackdown at the end of last year, dozens of MTU leaders were also arrested and deported.

The government’s attack culminated with the arrest of MTU’s President, Vice President and General Secretary on 27 November 2007 all at roughly the same time in the morning at three different places in Seoul. In each case, several immigration officers lay in waiting in front of the man’s house or workplace in what was clearly a pre-planned effort. The three men were detained in Cheongju Detention Center, two and a half hours outside of Seoul. Despite massive protest from MTU, supporters and the international labor and human rights communities, the men were taken secretly from their cells in the middle of the night, taken out a hole in the fence at the back of the detention center to avoid supporters who were guarding the front gate and then deported early in the morning of December 13th.

6. Fighting Back
After the arrest of the three leaders MTU and supporters from the labor movement and civil society began an ardent campaign to win their release, end the repression against migrant organizing and stop the crackdown and deportation of undocumented migrant workers. This campaign has continued despite the three men’s deportation on December 13. It is February now, two months after the MTU leadership was first arrested and nearing the one year anniversary of the tragic fire at Yeosu Detention Center. As we go into a period of memorial for those who passed away, MTU also seeks to raise awareness of the repression against migrant workers and migrant workers’ organizing in South Korea. We are preparing a series of press conference, panels and rallies beginning on February 11 culminating in a nation-wide protest on February 24th. We are asking organizations in working for immigrants/migrants’ rights in other countries to give this period international significance by organizing solidarity actions in front of South Korean embassies and other significant sites.

7. Conclusion
While it is clear that the situation of migrant workers in South Korea is particular to the country’s history, legal system and society, it should also be clear that there are many parallels between the struggles of migrants here and those of migrant/immigrants in the United States and indeed all around the world. The phenomenon of migration cannot be separated from the process of globalization in which we are all engulfed. Like in most other countries, the response to this reality in South Korea is one of policing borders, illegalizing people and exploiting them as a cheap labor force. The tragic fire in Yeosu and the repression against migrant workers’ organizing, then, should not be seen as merely South Korean problems. Rather, they are representative of the human rights and labor rights abuses against migrant workers everywhere. The struggle to win protection of these rights is a global struggle, to which international solidarity- collective sharing of information, strategizing and action- must become a greater part.

Right wing unionism

2008-02-29T22:57:00.000-08:00

A few years ago it seemed that the FKTU was becoming a little more progressive, perhaps trying to cast off the image of the government-controlled union they used to be during the dictatorship era. They even held protests, and made joint declarations with the KCTU. Lately it seems that they've been drifting back rightward, well at least their national leadership, who recently declared their intention to not press for higher wages.

No wage demands, labor boss promises

February 29, 2008
The new head of the moderate Federation of Korean Trade Unions, one of the nation’s two large umbrella labor groups, surprised union members yesterday by saying he would not press employers for higher wages this year.

You can read the whole article here.

solidarity with migrants in Korea

2008-02-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

I picked this up from CINA.

Before y'day(2.25) in Montreal/CN..

..a delegation representing the following migrant justice groups:
- Coalition In Support of Agricultural Workers-Quebec
- Immigrant Workers Center of Montreal
- Migrant Agricultural Workers Support Centre-Quebec
- No One Is Illegal-Montreal
- PINAY, the Filipino Women's Organization in Quebec
- Solidarity Across Borders
delivered a protest letter to the S. Korean consulate in Montreal:

"Once again, concerned members of the Montreal community are making direct contact with your consular officials, to bring to your attention the injustices and abuses faced by migrant workers in South Korea. We would like you to bring these concerns to the immediate attention of officials at the highest levels of the Korean government.

This month marks the first anniversary of the tragic fire at the Yeosu Foreigners' Detention Center (February 11, 2007), which killed ten migrant workers and wounded dozens more. This event was a direct result of the South Korean government's policy of crackdown and deportation of undocumented migrant workers and the poor conditions in detention centers.

A year later nothing has changed and repression against migrant workers and migrant workers' organizing continues. The government has carried out a severe attack against the Migrants' Trade Union (MTU), a union built by and for migrant workers, arresting and deporting its leadership in a targeted crackdown at the end of last year. It is also attempting to change South Korean immigration law to make it legal to enter buildings without warrants during immigration raids and stop anyone on the street "suspected of being an undocumented migrant."

We support the main demands of self-organized migrant justice groups in South Korea: stop the crackdown and deportations; legalize all undocumented migrant workers; stop the repression against MTU and migrant workers' organizing; & stop the worsening of immigration law.

Yesterday, on February 24, a nationwide rally was held in South Korea in support of these demands. We visit your offices today to re-iterate those just demands, and to stand in solidarity with the demonstrators on the streets of South Korea's cities and towns.

The migrant workers of South Korea are not alone. Locally, we struggle too against deportations and detentions, against exploitive "temporary work" programs and employers, and for workers democracy and dignity in the workplace.

We will continue to visit your office in protest until the demands of self-organized workers in South Korea and met.

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Signed,
Coalition In Support of Agricultural Workers-Quebec
Immigrant Workers Center of Montreal
Migrant Agricultural Workers Support Centre-Quebec
No One Is Illegal-Montreal
PINAY, the Filipino Women's Organization in Quebec
Solidarity Across Borders"

For more pics, please see also:

☞ 2.25 Montreal..

*****

Already Feb. 16 there was a Candle Light Protest in NYC/U.S.A.:

And last but not least.. here you can read

☞ KASAMMAKO's protest message ..for last Sunday's MTU rally!

Video of weekly MTU vigil

2008-02-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

The MTU and their supporters have been continuing their weekly vigils since the their entire leadership was arrested and deported in December, and more members have been deported since then. It's also been a year since the horrific Yeosu fire, not to mention that factory fire last fall that claimed a number of migrant workers. So it is certainly important for the MTU and their supporters to continue this important work. Here's the link to the video via CINA.

Some statistics

2008-02-18T12:25:00.000-08:00

Just to back up a bit of what I said below.

These statistics come from the yearly 2006 and 2007 'selected issues' reports from the IMF on Korea, available at their online archive here.

Wish this graphed the divergence between labour productivity and real wages back further (say to 1990) so one could grasp the larger trend. The dip in 2001 was probably from the credit crisis and a bit of a hangover from the 1997 crisis. At any rate, post-2002 it is clear that incomes are not rising with increased productivity.

I believe this figure (from SERI) is higher now, anyways, that exports and inequality seem to be going up together is certainly a indicator that not much is trickling down.
This last one is from a 2007 OECD report on labour market duality in Korea, it uses one of the more conservative measures of levels of irregular work (it does not include regular workers who are not paid bonuses and overtime which would make the 2005 figure approx 47%) but it still looks damning in comparision nonetheless.
The figure to look for here is adjusted consumption figure for Korea. The point here is that domestic consumption as % of GDP lags, link.

Income inequality worsening

2008-02-18T12:08:00.000-08:00

One good article and another editorial in the Hankyoreh today on the increasing amount of income inequality.

Here's a sample:

As the gap between rich and poor is expected to increase, the statistics typified a phenomenon that South Korea is facing: the co-existence of rich households with more income than those in a developed economy and poor households with income equivalent to those in an underdeveloped economy. Last year, the average monthly income of the bottom 20 percent households was 1,329,307 won (US$1,407). Given the average number of family members, 2.87, and a won-dollar exchange rate of 929.20, the annual per-capita income of the bottom 20 percent of the population was calculated at $5,982. In contrast, the average monthly income of the upper 20 percent of households was 7,234,415 won. With 3.64 family members, the annual per-capita income of the upper 20 percent was $25,667. According to worldwide income statistics for 2006, released by the World Bank, the standard of living of the bottom 20 percent of the population is similar to that of people living in Gabon and El Salvador, while the standard of living of the upper 20 percent is similar to that of people living in Australia and New Zealand.

The silver lining to all this may be the following:

According to recent surveys executed by Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun and Britain’s BBC, Korea has the highest ratio of people who are dissatisfied with socioeconomic polarization. Up to 86 percent of Koreans are discontent with the nation’s income disparity.

I guess this is the major factor distinguishing inequality in Korea vs. other countries like the UK or the US, where people seem much more comfortable with the income gap, preferring to regard it as a failure of the individual rather than society. No such analysis seems possible in Korea yet -- I suppose because the memory of the developmental dictatorship, the economic crisis, and the clear structural biases of the different economic models Korea has followed (developmental dictatorship and some sort of chaebol-style or export push style neoliberalism) have always been apparent because of the rapid pace of economic mobilization (of getting people to work under bad conditions in export manufacturing to the neglect of domestic social issues and economic welfare), change (like flexibilizing the already precarious through their employment status), and reform (IMF and other shock therapy like labour legislation, FTAs, etc). All this creates winners and losers, or especially bitter losers judging as compensation for them is extremely low, just look at the figures on total welfare expenditure compared to other countries and you will see what I mean.

New Seoulidarity video

2008-02-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

CINA has just posted a newly translated video from Cinema Soulidarity about migrant and irregular worker struggles in Korea. Here is the link.

Yet another senseless death

2008-02-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

From today's JoongAng Ilbo:

A lonely death underscores sad migrants¨ plight
Immigration officials sympathize but say laws must be followed
February 11, 2008

A lonely death underscores sad migrants¨ plight
Immigration officials sympathize but say laws must be followed
February 11, 2008

Migrant workers stage a rally to protest a recent crackdown on illegal workers on Jan. 20 in Jongno, central Seoul. Advocates say Korea¨s 223,000 illegal workers often take jobs no one else wants. [NEWSIS]
＾For the first time in eight years, I saw my mom. She was lying cold on a slab at a morgue,￣ said Oh Jeong-hwa at a mourning altar for her mother at Seoul National University Hospital last week.
Oh¨s mother, Kwon Bong-ok, died on Jan. 15 after falling from the 8th floor of a motel in Seoul where she was working as an illegal immigrant. She had been dangling from the window ledge by her fingers to hide from South Korean immigration officers hunting for illegals.
The 51-year-old ethnic Korean from China came to Seoul in 1999 to earn money to pay off a family debt and provide college tuition for Oh. ＾My mother called me the day before she died and told me that she would come back to China soon. She said she missed me so much,￣ Oh said.
With the death of another migrant worker during an enforcement crackdown, the Korean Immigration Service has been facing criticism for its policies. Civic groups held a street rally last month to protest against the service¨s ＾merciless￣ inspection of workers.
Oh demanded that the service make an official apology for driving her mother into a corner. ＾How scared she must have been,￣ Oh lamented.
＾During past immigration inspections, several illegal aliens died after falling from buildings; some even committed suicide because they could not stand the pressure,￣ said Kim Hae-seong, the chairman of the Korea Migrants¨ Center, a support group.
The immigration service, however, says that sentiment is not the way to handle the issue of illegal immigration. With civic groups and some media emphasizing the hardships faced by illegal aliens, they neglect the fact that local laws are being violated and the service¨s enforcement efforts are hindered, immigration officials say. ＾We feel really sorry for her loss,￣ said Kim Young-geun, an official at the service. ＾Still, the inspection was conducted in accordance with the law and we cannot apologize for that.￣
According to the Justice Ministry, there were an estimated 223,000 illegal aliens in the country as of last year. About 22,000 illegal migrants were caught and deported last year, down from 23,000 in 2006, according to the service.
The risks of combating illegal immigration, say officials, run both ways. On Jan. 30, an immigration officer was stabbed in the thigh by a Bangladeshi illegal migrant who was trying to flee an inspection raid. Twenty immigration officers were injured last year, compared to six during similar enforcement drives in 2004, according to the service.
＾Because the media and civic groups protect illegal workers¨ rights, some illegals do not respect the officers¨ authority and are not afraid of attacking them,￣ said another official, who refused to be named.
According to police, Kwon locked herself in a room after she found out an inspection was underway at the motel in Jongno where she was working as a maid. When the officers opened the door after about 10 minutes, she had already fallen to her death eight floors below.
＾I went to the motel and I saw her fingerprints on the window sill. Her cell phone, the one she called me on the day before, was broken in half,￣ said Oh.
The immigration service¨s Kim claimed it was an unfortunate accident and that Kwon was likely trying to escape from the eighth floor to a seventh-floor window. ＾The gap between the two floors was just 1.5 meters (4.9 feet),￣ he said. ＾We agree with her family that she did not commit suicide. We think something went wrong while she was trying to go down.￣
Oh, who came to Seoul on Jan. 20 after learning of her mother¨s death, delayed the funeral until Feb. 5. ＾I was waiting for an apology from the inspection officers. But I decided to hold a funeral because I could not make her stay in a cold morgue during the Lunar New Year,￣ said Oh.
The director of the immigration service, Hwang Taek-hwan, attended the funeral but no official apology was made.
Migrant Trade Unions, a labor union of migrant workers in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, also has been holding daily protests since Dec. 13 after three Nepalese, who had been executive members of the union, were deported. The union and the Korea Confederation of Trade Unions argue that the service targeted union members.
＾They had lived here illegally for more than a decade. One forged his passport when he entered the country. It was an absolutely just decision [to deport them],￣ said the service¨s Kim.
The plight of the migrants, however, is understandable, said the migrant center¨s Kim. ＾Many paid a lump sum to a broker to come to Korea. They try to stay until at least they can pay back their debts,￣ he explained.
Soon Goon-saeng, a 40-year-old Chinese man, was one such worker. On Nov. 25, he was confronted by immigration officers as he was leaving a church service. He jumped from a third floor rooftop to the ground. He suffered two broken ankles and has been through two operations.
＾I paid 10 million won ($10,619) to a broker to come to Korea. If I return to China without paying back the debt, I will be harassed everyday,￣ said Soon, who has been hospitalized at a hospital run by the Migrant Workers¨ Center.
The center¨s Chairman Kim said the government should embrace illegal migrant workers by introducing a system in which they can go back to their country and return here with a valid visa. There is demand for their services and they do work that many Koreans no longer want to do, he said.
＾Most illegal migrant workers worked here for years before their visa expired. I think it would be waste for the government to force such experienced workers to leave the country,￣ said Kim.
Currently, foreign migrant workers are allowed to work under an employment permit system, which went into effect in 2004. Under the system, a worker can stay for up to three years and renew the visa for another three years the employee agrees.
For Oh, it is too late to worry about reforming a system that she believes is responsible for her mother¨s death. ＾I just hope there will be no one who suffers like my mother any more,￣ said Oh, sitting at the mourning altar alone.

Park Yeon-soo contributed to this article.

By Kim Soe-jung Staff Reporter [soejung@joongang.co.kr]

before the abyss

2008-02-12T11:48:00.000-08:00

I'm sort of in another slow posting period as the dissertation work heats up and certainly not because there is a lack of interesting news out there, and more to come as Lee Myung Bak is inaugurated.

For the moment, I would suggest keeping an eye on the Hankyoreh and on Chamsesang's new English service Newscham. There are interesting stories on both those sites about the Taean disaster, the split in the KDLP, and the slow emergence of Lee Myung Bak-ism all of which make a grim time for Korean progressive forces (hence the abyss) but also hopefully one that leads to better clarity and opportunity later.

Oh, and Matt's blog Gusts of Popular Feeling and his continuing play-by-play on the urban redevelopment of Seoul is not to be missed.

all that is solid melts into air

2008-01-24T11:48:00.000-08:00

Matt over at gusts of popular feeling, documents the redevelopment around Hapjeong, Seoul, which is right next to the area around Hong Gik university, a popular destination for clubs, cafes and live music. The area is also perhaps one of the few neighbourhood undergoing a western-style gentrification in the sense of people revamping old buildings and turning them into up-market cafes, offices and living spaces. However, this sort of gentrification is not the preferred one in Seoul, where a more intensive bulldozer approach to urban redevelopment (just smashing everything and then building homogeneous apartments or slightly more varied condos) is favored. Anyways, as you can see from Matt's photos, such an approach to development certainly creates strange landscapes in the city, reminiscent almost of war or natural disasters.

The photo below seems to include one homeowner who has not settled for compensation.

Help wanted?

2008-01-22T22:29:00.000-08:00

If the first 30 or so days of Lee Myung Bak as president-elect is any indication, this blog is going to need more volunteers.

I've been busy and haven't posted much, but it seems from all the ministries the guy is closing down and from attitudes towards labour, peaceful engagement with North Korea, Human Rights, etc, it is going to be quite a season.

For the moment, some reading from the Herald and the Choson on LMB's decision to close the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family:

Women's groups slam ministry closure

Women's rights groups are stepping up their opposition to plans to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which they claim would significantly weaken policies to support women and get rid of gender-based discrimination.

President-elect Lee Myung-bak's government transition team is looking to integrate the ministry with the Health and Welfare Ministry as part of a sweeping government reorganization plan.

A group of former and incumbent heads of ministries and public agencies handling gender-related policies yesterday issued a statement calling for the consolidation plan to be scrapped.

A coalition of 30 women's rights advocacy groups launched a nationwide petition to retain the ministry and promote gender equality.

They criticized Lee for breaking his campaign promise to enhance the ministry.

On Nov. 30 Lee said in a nationally televised meeting, "I will combine all the functions across the other ministries into the Gender Equality Ministry. Publicly stating such a thing makes me feel burdened during this campaign period, however, I will make good on this promise without fail."

Their outrage was further fuelled by recent remarks by Lee which seemingly disparaged the ministry.

"The ministry is only for those who assert female power," Lee said Friday during a meeting with Democratic Party leaders.

"We are disappointed and concerned about Lee's warped prejudice against and denunciation of the Gender Equality Ministry. His statement manifests his fundamental lack of understanding of the ministry," former and incumbent senior ministry officials, including Minster Jang Ha-jin and former ministers Han Myeong-sook and Chi Eun-hee, said in a statement.

"The ministry's work to date has not been to seek 'female power.' We should not forget that the ministry's efforts are based on the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination to enhance the rights of the women in the dead zones of our society," the statement added.

The 30-group coalition also held a press conference in downtown Seoul declaring a nationwide campaign against the plan.

"The proposed plan to merge the ministry with the Health and Welfare Ministry is equivalent to absorbing women into a patriarchal welfare paradigm, which would make gender-equality policies vanish into thin air," it said.

It added that there is a need for society to ensure equality and care, and that the ministry has a role to play in forging a new paradigm.

The transition team on Monday submitted 45 legislative bills seeking to restructure the new government, which is scheduled to take power on Feb. 25. The plan includes the creation of the Health, Welfare and Gender Equality Ministry which combine the functions of the two ministries and the Government Youth Commission.

By Song Sang-ho

(sshluck@heraldm.com)

Women’s Groups Ready to Fight for Gender Ministry

Women's rights groups are voicing growing resistance to the next government’s plan to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Women's organizations, academics and lawyers, be they progressive or conservative, are unanimously calling for the ministry to be retained.

On Tuesday morning, eight former and incumbent chiefs of government agencies for women-related affairs, including Kim Young-jeong, Lee Yun-sook and Yoon Hoo-jung, issued a statement saying president-elect Lee Myung-bak's remarks at the Democratic Party headquarters last Friday, “show how insufficient his understanding of the Gender Equality Ministry is, a government agency that has made efforts to improve the rights of most women. He has very dangerous notions that can cause women's policies to regress."

Visiting DP headquarters last Friday, the president elect said, "The Gender Equality Ministry is a government agency designed for those who want (political) power for women."

At 10 a.m. on Tuesday, progressive and conservative women's organizations jointly launched a campaign to collect 1 million signatures to keep the ministry and realize gender equality in society.

Prof. Lee Young-ja of the Catholic University of Korea said, "In the past, women were silenced in everything. But now women are calling for their own rights. Is this their expression of ambition for political power? A majority of women are still suffering human rights violations. When he was invited to a seminar on women's policies as presidential candidate in November last year, he promised to retain and expand the Gender Equality Ministry. But after the election, he reneged on his promise. We should bring criminal charges against him for fraud."

Oh Yoo-seok, the head of the Korea Women's Political Solidarity, said the groups are ready to occupy the National Assembly if necessary.

Is the party over?

2008-01-09T00:43:00.000-08:00

NewsCham has two interesting articles up about tensions within the Korean Democratic Labour Party after its dismal performance in last months presidential election.

Newscham: KDLP in Crisis
Why did the left turn their backs against the KDLP?

Landmark ruling for KTX struggle?

2007-12-27T21:17:00.001-08:00

From the Korea times:

Court Stands by Female KTX Crew

By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter

A court has ruled that female crewmembers of the KTX, Korean bullet train, are employees of the state-run Korea Railroad (Korail).

The ruling is expected to result in a breakthrough of a long-term dispute between the female workers and the train company. Korail and KTX female attendants have been in conflict over working conditions of woman employees for almost two years.

While the women attendants are claiming they are dispatched workers from the train company, Korail is denying their claims saying they are under its outsourcing company which hired them as contract workers.

The Seoul Central District Court, Thursday, imposed a 1.5 million won fine on a director of KTX attendants on charges of staging an illegal strike but the court made it clear Korail is the actual employer of the protesting female crews.

The court stated that the outsourcing contracts on working conditions between the attendants and Korail Retail is not a substantial but nominal agreement. ``KTX female crews actually work for Korail. There is a silent working agreement between the crewmembers and the company. So Korail is the employer of the female workers according to laws on labor union and labor relations adjustment,’’ it said.

The court also said that Korail Retail was established with 100 percent of its shares owned by Korail and the management group is also from the train company. In addition, it is Korail that made regulations on KTX crews and the two companies cooperate to recruit crewmembers for the bullet train.

The court also pointed out that Korail was negligent in solving the dispute over the working conditions of the protesting crewmembers. Some 70 KTX female attendants lost their jobs as they refused to wear their uniforms to protest their poor working conditions.

Merry Christmas

2007-12-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

CINA has pulled out of the vaults an old video of a Christmas 2003 action by the then ETU (MTU's predecessor) during a period of crackdown. When has there not been a period of crackdown? It seems that only its intensity seems to change. Anyways, if you have a sharp eye you can spot many of the migrant labour movements current and former activists about, most of whom have been forcibly deported over the years.

Here's the link.

Hankyoreh editorial on International Migrant's Day

2007-12-18T23:57:00.000-08:00

From today's Hankyoreh:

[Editorial] Ensuring the rights of migrant workers

Yesterday was International Migrants’ Day, established to celebrate the adoption of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers on December 18, 1990. Unlike other rights conventions which seek to promote rights based on citizenship and rights of residency, it called for the protection of rights regardless of legal status. The convention calls for the respect and guarantee of rights regardless of gender, race, skin color, language or any other distinction.

Korea is now in an era in which it has 500,000 migrant workers and a million immigrants, and the realities they face are so harsh and miserable that evening mentioning the convention is embarrassing. They face a host of discriminatory practices, including low wages, long hours, and the withholding of wages. Yesterday, on International Migrants’ Day, the authorities arrested “illegal aliens” in Seoul’s Dongdaemun neighborhood and other areas. We do not take issue with enforcing the law. But when the law is going to be enforced, a minimum level of civil rights procedures need to be observed. The indiscriminate way the authorities charge into residences and places of work unannounced to arrest and detain people is the same as a government admission that migrant workers have no rights.

The situation is all the more serious because of the changes the Ministry of Justice seeks to make to immigration law. The new law would allow the authorities to stop and question foreigners just for thinking them suspect. Laws governing the police require police officials to present their identification and state to what police organization they belong, even when stopping a Korean national on the street. Immigration officials should at the very least be required to identify themselves before accosting foreigners. The National Human Rights Commission once formally recommended that even when arresting illegal aliens there need to be clear parameters of authority, conditions and procedures. The Ministry of Justice’s proposed revision will allow officials to enter offices and worksites whenever they suspect there are illegal aliens inside. In other words, the revision was formulated out of consideration for nothing other than efficiency and convenience for those enforcing the law. Nowhere do you see that any thought was given to migrant workers’ rights.

It should not be that way. Migrant workers deserve the same universal rights as all of the members of our society. That belief is the convention’s point of departure. The government needs to stop determining whether their rights are respected based on whether their status is legal or not. Since it was International Migrants’ Day yesterday, the government needs to ask itself why 38 countries have signed the convention, and whether Korea still has an excuse not to ratify it.

MTU solidarity action in Montreal

2007-12-13T16:05:00.000-08:00

No One is Illegal - Montreal visited the Korean consulate in Montreal today. Here is a quick report and pictures on their action.

Dear friends --

Attached and below is the text of the letter delivered earlier today to the South Korean Consulate in Montreal by a small delegation of activists representing No One Is Illegal, Solidarity Across Borders and the Immigrant Workers Center. We have included a few photos. The last photo shows the Consul-General taking our second copy of the letter, after ripping our first copy; he was upset that we had taken photos. We insisted in taking photos to send to our allies in South Korea.

In solidarity and struggle,
The members of No One Is Illegal-Montreal, with the support of Solidarity Across Borders and the Immigrant Workers Center.

December 13, 2007 -- MONTREAL (QUEBEC, CANADA)

HAND-DELIVERED

TO: The Consul-General of South Korea in Montreal
1 Place Ville-Marie, Suite 2015, Montreal, Quebec, H3B 2C4

FROM: Members of No One Is Illegal, Solidarity Across Borders, & the Immigrant Workers Center (IWC) in Montreal

RE: Crackdown on Migrant Workers in South Korea

Dear Sir/Madam –

We are writing to express our outrage at the recent arrests of members of the Migrant Workers Trade Union (MTU) on November 27, 2007. We demand the immediate release of Kajiman Khapung, Raju Kumar Gurung (Raj) and Abul Basher M. Moniruzzaman (Masum) from the Cheongju detention center. We also demand and end to the targeted crackdown and labor repression against the MTU, and an end to the crackdown and deportation of undocumented migrant workers!

It is our understanding that Kajiman, Raj and Masum might have already been summarily deported. If so, we condemn the removal of these three men, and demand their return to South Korea, if they so choose.

We condemn the current crackdown on migrant workers in South Korea. Migrants come to Korea to do the "3-D" jobs: dirty, dangerous and difficult. They are the super-exploited amongst Korea's working people, and their lack of permanent status denies them basic rights.

Like other social justice organizations in South Korea, we are also writing to support the immediate regularization or "legalization" of all migrant workers in South Korea. As we say in our campaigns: "If they're good enough to work, they're good enough to stay". The more than 200,000 migrant workers in South Korea should be given full rights, as any citizen.

We make these demands as we also struggle for justice for all migrants and non-status persons in the Canadian state. Similar to the South Korean government, the Canadian government exploits "temporary" foreign labour; moreover, upwards of 500,000 people live in Canada without status. We express our solidarity with migrant workers in South Korea with this letter, but also with our day-to-day campaigns for justice and dignity in our own communities.

We ask that the South Korean Consulate express these concerns to the highest levels of the Korean government.

With sincere outrage,

Degane Sougal & Jaggi Singh
No One Is Illegal-Montreal
514-848-7583 - noii-montreal(at)resist.ca
http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com

MTU leaders deported

2007-12-13T12:48:00.000-08:00

The article below is from the KCTU's website today. CINA has video and more info here.

Photo : Emergency Committee to Stop the Crackdown on MTU holding the press conference to denounce the forcible deportation of three MTU leaders on December 13th[Photo from Chamnews]

Uregent : Three Leaders of Migrants Trade Union Deported, Morning of Dec. 13!

Early this morning (Dec. 13) President Kajiman, Vice President Raju and General Secretary Masum of the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union (a KCTU affiliate) were secreted out of Cheongju Detention Center, where they had been confined since they were arrested in a targeted crackdown on November 27. It has been confirmed that they were transported to Incheon International Airport and deported to their native countries (Nepal and Bangladesh) during the morning hours. This act by the Ministry of Justice is yet a further escalation of its repression against MTU and the organizing of migrant workers in South Korea.

Sequence of Events

On November 27, the three MTU leaders were arrested in a clearly targeted crackdown in an attempt to stop MTU’s union activities. Since then MTU has formed an Emergency Committee and has been carrying out an intense campaign for their release, including a sit-in protest begun on Dec. 5.

MTU and the allies in our Emergency Committee first became aware of the Ministry of Justice’s move to deport the 3 MTU leaders around noon on Dec. 11, when we received a call from the Nepalese Embassy informing us they had sent travel documents to Cheongju Detention Center for President Kajiman and Vice President Raju. Later that night, we also heard that our application for a stay of deportation was turned down by the Ministry of Justice. We therefore moved quickly and dispatched a team of over 20 allies to Cheongju to attempt to block any vehicles that could be carrying the 3 leaders out of the detention center. We were able to block a bus, through the windows of which we could see General Secretary Masum, for several hours early this morning. A brief press conference was held at 7:30am under the belief that we had temporarily succeeded in blocking the deportation.

However, later we heard reports from the Immigration Authorities and Ministry of Justice that at least two, if not all the leaders had been deported. Then, at roughly 8:30am, we received a call from a Nepali person whom had seen President Kajiman and Vice President Raju board a plane at Incheon International Airport and called us on their behalf. At roughly 10:45am, we also received a call from General Secretary Masum, confirming he had been deported as well. It has become clear that all three men were eventually taken out of Cheongju Detention Center in civilian cars through routes of which we were not aware earlier.

Significance

The early morning deportation of the MTU leaders confirms even more sharply that the Ministry of Justice is acting to repress the activities of MTU and the independent organizing of migrant workers in South Korea. This is obvious from the Ministry of Justice’s own statement that they had noted not only the union organizing of MTU but also its participation in other progressive struggles. What is more, the Ministry of Justice has broken its promise not to carry out the deportations until the National Human Rights Commission has completed its investigation of the case and made a recommendation. The Ministry of Justice is acting with completely no respect for the labor rights and human rights of migrant workers in South Korea. Its actions represent an attack on not only migrant workers, but on organized labor and all progressive forces in South Korea.

We are also gravely concerned that the President, Vice President and General Secretary will meet more repression when they return to their home countries. Our previous president, President Anwar, was detained and investigated by the Bangladeshi authorities for ‘anti-Korean’ and ‘anti-government’ activities upon returning home earlier this year. We have strong reason to believe that this was in large part due to pressure put on the Bangladeshi authorities by the South Korean government. Given the high likelihood of similar problem now, we are calling on progressive force in Nepal and Bangladesh to do everything they can to block acts of repression by their local authorities.

Response

We are determined not to let the government’s blatant acts of repression intimidate us. Rather, our struggle will only grow stronger, sending a clear message that the organizing of migrant workers to win the rights they deserve will not be crushed. We will continue and expand the sit-in struggle and carry out protests from now to the end of the year demanding the end of repression against MTU and of the crackdown and deportation of undocumented migrants.

Solidarity

Now, more than ever, we need your solidarity. Already, protests actions have been organized in front of South Korean embassies in the Philippines, Nepal, Japan and Hong Kong.

International Migrants’ Day is around the corner on Dec. 18. Many of you have event planned.

-If you do we ask that you add a strong message of protest against the attacks on MTU and on all migrant workers in South Korea.

-If you do not have anything planned, we asked that you organize a demonstration in front of your local South Korean consulate or embassy, shaming the South Korean government for its blatant violations of the labor rights and human rights of migrant workers.

-Please send any pictures of your protests to inter@kctu.org and migrant@jinbo.net

-Please continue to send solidarity statements to migrant@jinbo.net/ inter@kctu.org and protest letters to the Ministry of Justice, fax: 82-2-503-3532 or 82-2-500-9128.

Wining the labor rights and human rights of migrant workers in South Korea and around the world is our collective task. Let us move forward together strongly!

deported!

2007-12-13T01:41:00.000-08:00

It appears that MTU general secretary Masum has been deported. The others have probably have been as well, or so I gander from reading this:

So today the High Court officially refused to hear the appeal for Masum, Kajiman and Raju's release. Which means we are pretty much out of legal avenues to fight for their release. I heard from a Nepalese friend today that Raju and Kajiman have both been cleared by the Nepalese embassy for travel and it looks like they will probably be gone by tomorrow.

Unfortunately they will all probably just disappear without being able to make any phone calls, so we won't know that they are gone for sure until they find phones in whatever countries they have lay-overs in.

I'll update more info as I get it.

Mahbub Alam on MTU arrests, migrants in Korea, MWTV, etc

2007-12-11T00:16:00.000-08:00

This week's No One Is Illegal radio broadcast (from Canada) has a longer interview with Mahbub Alam of MWTV on a bunch of topics: the MTU arrests, migrants issues in Korea, MWTV and more. You can download the whole show or just that segment of the show here from radio4all.

Videos from the year long sit in by migrant workers

2007-12-08T16:41:00.000-08:00

CINA has just posted the links to video interviews and video documentary coverage of the one year sit-in by migrant workers that ended in November 2004. Great to see someone saving this information.

the politics of suspicion

2007-12-08T16:14:00.000-08:00

South Korea's Chamsesang new English site Newscham has excellent story up on recent revisions to Korea's immigration law that allow immigration officials to question and detain migrants in Korea on the basis of suspicion alone.

In addition, the Asian Human Rights Commission has released more info on the law and an online petition for the release of our friends in the MTU.

new template

2007-12-03T19:17:00.000-08:00

I decided to change over to the 'new blogger' (which is actually a few years old already) just because it is easier to control. However, this effects some of our older posts where it would say "view full posting" so that readers could read on. Now some of those longer posts will be included in their entirety but with a small text tag saying (continue reading) somewhere in the body.

If you've noticed the layout changing a bit it is because I am experimenting with different styles, for the moment (after a few changes) I think I'll keep the blue dots layout, for 'brand' identification if you will. Let me know what you think if you have strong opinions otherwise, or if you notice some formating errors anywhere.

Canada Korea Free Trade Agreement

2007-12-03T18:45:00.000-08:00

The blog of the Canadian Progressive Economics Forum has posted the testimony of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives to parliament on the Korea-Canada FTA negotiations. Seems that the FTA is trying to copy the Korea-US FTA by putting a keeping a lot of the ugly stuff in it -- Chapter 11 Nafta-type investor-state dispute mechanisms, WTO TRIPS + agreements, and the like.

Below is a sample, you can read the entire testimony by Scott Sinclair of the CCPA here.

Pursuing monopoly protection beyond that required by WTO rules in the Canada-Korea or Canada-Andean pacts would set a very bad precedent, locking in domestic policies that Canadian governments may want to change in future, and reducing access to essential medicines in FTA partner countries. An analysis by Oxfam estimates that similar provisions in the US-Colombia draft FTA would cost Colombians an extra $940 million a year to buy more expensive medicines.

Amnesty International on MTU arrests

2007-12-03T18:42:00.000-08:00

South Korea: Crackdown against Migrants' Trade Union

Amnesty International would like to express serious concern at the arrest of three senior officials of the Migrant Workers' Trade Union (MTU) on the morning of 27 November 2007 (Tuesday). Amnesty International is concerned that they may be arbitrarily returned to their countries of origin.

Following their arrest, MTU President Kajiman Khapung, Vice President Raju Kumar Gurung (Raj) and General Secretary Abul Basher M. Moniruzzaman (Masum) were taken to a detention centre in Cheongju, Northern Chuncheong Province, south of Seoul.

President Kajiman and General Secretary Masum were arrested in front of their houses as they were leaving to participate in a protest in front of the Seoul Immigration Office. Vice President Raj was arrested in front of the factory where he works.

They were detained for being in an irregular or undocumented situation and are at risk of being returned without due process.

Amnesty International believes that the arrests of Kajiman, Raj and Masum are an attempt by the Government to deprive them of their basic labour rights protected in the South Korean constitution, including the right to freedom of association. They also appear to be repressive measures by the Government authorities to stop the MTU from conducting its rightful union activities. They appear to be a continuation of crackdowns that have been conducted against irregular migrant workers in South Korea since August 2007.

Amnesty International considers Kajiman Khapung, Raju Kumar Gurung and Abul Basher M Moniruzzaman to be prisoners of conscience and urges the South Korean Government to release the three men immediately and unconditionally. Amnesty International is concerned that their arrest represents a violation of the right to freedom of association and represents an assault on the human rights of migrant workers. The organisation calls on the South Korean Government not to return the men to their countries of origin without a full and individual assessment of their circumstances, including due process safeguards and the right to appeal the decision to an independent authority.

Background:

The Seoul High Court issued a judgement on 1 February 2007 calling for the cancellation of the rejection by the authorities of the Migrant Workers' Trade Union's Notice of Union Founding. This ruling, in effect, recognizes and thereby legalizes the MTU as a union representing the rights of all migrant workers, regardless of their status. The Ministry of Labour has reportedly appealed against this decision to the Supreme Court.

Previously, the South Korea Government had rejected calls for the formation of a migrant workers' trade union arguing that irregular migrant workers did not qualify as workers under existing legislation.

Irregular migrant workers can now be part of a legally recognized trade union. There are some 230,000 irregular migrant workers in South Korea. However, they remain at constant risk of arrest, detention and return.

The arrests of the three senior MTU officials come at a time when the MTU were reportedly planning campaigns against revisions to the Immigration Law proposed by the Ministry of Justice. These revisions could remove the requirement on authorities, in the process of conducting checks on migrant workers, to present identification documentation, to obtain other relevant documentation such as warrants prior to entering buildings, and the necessity of obtaining detention orders before arresting migrant workers. In the crackdowns against irregular migrant workers since August 2007, about 20 MTU members and officials have been arrested.

MWTV visits jailed MTU leadership

2007-12-03T16:02:00.000-08:00

Five members of Migrant Workers TV travelled down to Cheongju on Thursday, Nov. 29 to pay a visit to the 3 MTU members who were ambushed and arrested Tuesday morning. We spoke about their ordeal with them for about 30 minutes, giving them our support and passing on well wishes from their many friends on the outside. Masum described how the Immigration Department had prepared for this operation to the point of even knowing what type of medication he was currently taking. This was clearly a carefully planned crackdown on the MTU leadership. Masum, Kajiman and Raju are trying to keep their spirits up and urged us to do whatever we could to publicize this violation of their rights as human beings and migrant laborers. Having secretly brought in cameras and recording devices into the interview room, we were able to record a short video of our conversation, while the guards paced back and forth outside the windowed room, constantly peering in on us during the course of our visit. The video will be aired on our next news broadcast.

Reckless Inequality

2007-11-30T19:32:00.000-08:00

Also reprinted at interlocals (with pictures) and Znet (without block quotes).

Reckless inequality: Dramatic arrests of Migrant Trade Union leadership highlight South Korea’s failed labour and migration policies

Entire MTU leadership arrested

On Tuesday, November 27th, the entire executive of South Korea’s Migrant Trade Union was arrested by immigration officials in three co-coordinated morning actions targeting these migrants at their places of work and residence.

The MTU is a courageous union of undocumented migrant workers, supported by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) that has been active for three years in advocating for migrant workers rights. In recent months they had held a mass memorial service for migrants that had died in Korea, whether on the job or off. They also won a precedent-setting case at the Seoul High court which had ruled that the government must accept the legal registration of the Migrant Trade Union, something which the government failed to do, preferring instead, it seems, to arrest the union’s leadership rather than recognize it legally.

At roughly 9:20am on November 27, MTU President Kajiman was leaving home to attend a planned protest in front of the Seoul Immigration Office when more than 10 immigration officers who had been hiding confronted him in front of his house.

General Secretary Masum also left his house the morning of the 27th in order to attend the protest in front of the Seoul Immigration Office. As he walked down the street, four 4 large men passed by who were laughing amongst themselves. He originally did not pay attention to them; however, immediately after, roughly 10-20 immigration officers and other people came up from behind and surrounded him.

At roughly the same time 4 immigration officers in front of the factory where he worked confronted Vice President Raju. When he demanded to see the officers’ identification cards, they presented him with a detention order and arrested him. Within hours, all three men were sent to a detention center in Cheongju, Northern Choongjeong Province, south of the capital Seoul.

In response to the arrests the KCTU has issued a petition for the release of the MTU leadership and have charged that the simultaneous arrest of three MTU leaders is a clearly a targeted attack, part of an intensification of the immigration crackdown against undocumented migrants in South Korea since the beginning of August of this year.

During this time more than 20 MTU members and officers of the MTU have been arrested. As with previous crackdowns, the authorities have admitted that the numbers of undocumented workers have not significantly decreased. The number of foreign residents in Korea has recently approached 1 million with some 230,000 said to be undocumented.

Failed migration policy reform

These numbers have swelled in recent years with the expansion of the Employment Permit System (EPS), an increase in the number of transnational marriages, and new laws governing the migration of ethnic Korean Chinese.

The EPS, designed to replace the discredited Industrial Trainee System, remains flawed in protecting migrant’s rights and encourages illegality as it has not been configured to factor in the actual costs of migration to individual workers (in the sense of hidden and illegal recruitment and brokerage costs that persist for migrants from particular regions; short, 1-3 year time horizons for employment that leaves both workers and employers with incentives to overstay the contract; and problems associated with the initial implementation of the EPS which ignored the majority of undocumented migrants in Korea by excluding them from access to permits).

Thus, a large portion of the increase in the number of undocumented year by year consists of overstayers rather than new migrants. Rather than correcting the system, the government, largely at the behest of the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Government and Home Affairs, has chosen to pursue crackdowns on the undocumented while recruiting newer workers from overseas.

As has been documented by South Korea’s own National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) [1], immigration officials routinely ignore legal procedures for dealing with migrant workers such as arranging prior warrants and disclosing their identification, and the immigration detention centers are often ill-equipped to deal with the large number of migrants they arrest in terms of safety, space, and medical care.

This message was brought home this past February when a fire at the Yeosu detention center left nine migrants dead and more injured. The fire exposed the shoddy safety conditions of migrant detention centers and the way in which the migrants who survived were treated (deported with slight compensation and before their injuries had fully healed) shocked many in Korean civil society and the public in general, spurring a further investigation by the NHRC.

The be fair, the government has attempted to make progress in terms of programs for transnational brides and children of migrant workers and Koreans as part of its anti-discrimination policies. Civil society groups have even participated in this reform and in designing service delivery. However, a number of grassroots organizations have been critical of the ways in which these services have been designed (such as education around traditional manners for foreign brides rather than education in their legal rights and resources in cases of abuse) and delivered (the creation of separate programs for ‘Kosians’ -- children of Korean and other Asians -- rather than anti-discrimination education in schools and workplaces, etc).

Fundamentally, however, anti-discrimination policy will remain stalled unless it can deal with the issues of migration policy design and the procedural violation of migrant’s rights inherent in this unjust crackdown and in the Employment Permit System itself.

As the national daily Hankyoreh reported earlier this week, progressive reform to immigration legislation does not seem likely in the near future; in fact, the opposite seems the case:

An even greater problem is that earlier this month the government revised the Immigration Law to allow agents to question foreigners based on suspicion alone, without regard to time and place, further angering migrant workers. It is not that one cannot understand wanting to provide in the law some tools to work with while enforcing it, but it is a problem when the law just gives agents wide-ranging authority and includes no stipulations on procedures.

A law governing the national police requires that a police officer present identification and identify himself when stopping someone for questioning. Similarly, at the very least, immigration officials need to be required to prove who they are. It was in 2005 that the National Human Rights Commission officially recommended that immigration be given clear conditions, parameters on authority, and procedures for arresting illegal aliens.

This failure of immigration law reform has led, as the MTU and other migrant groups have complained, to a near permanent state of immigration crackdown targeting migrants in their places of work, residence, and in public space.

One of the reasons why the MTU has been targeted, perhaps, is that they have been the most vocal in creating an organization led by the people most effected by the crackdown -- the undocumented themselves – and, along with Migrant Worker’s Television and a handful of other grassroots groups, have been the most vocal in representing their plight. Their struggles has been recognized in statements by leading Korean unions and NGOs, as well in their interaction with international organizations including Amnesty International, the UN Special Rapporteur on Migrants, and the International Labour Organization, among others, which have brought attention to the Korean government’s migration policies.

However, as has been reported in Znet and elsewhere over the last few years, the MTU and its predecessor, the ETU, have lost the majority of their leadership over the years to targeted crackdowns and government repression.

Reckless inequality

If one steps back for a minute, it is easy to see that a lot of the suffering caused immigration law is part of a larger symptom of Korean labour market policies that attempt to create flexible labour markets with little concern for those affected.

Since the 1997 crisis, and indeed before, labour law has been used to flexibilize the employment relationship and has contributed to rocketing social inequality that harmful for both politics and the economy, undermining democratic process and making the Korean economy more dependent on exports and financialization to maintain domestic demand.

The ‘participatory government’ of former labour lawyer Roh Moo Hyun has used an incomplete tripartite committee (passing agreements without consent of the largest trade union federation), unpredicted use of damage claims against workers for illegal strikes, and repression of union protests in order to get these reforms past.

For what it is worth, the KCTU has attempted to assist workers affected by these policies but has encountered its own difficulties both internally and externally. These contradictions were exposed this summer after the new labour law on irregular work was passed and strikes and sit-ins of a largely female-led force of irregular workers proliferated. In the weeks after the events, the ability of the KCTU to mobilize solidarity did not live up to what was promised and the strikes fizzled and were marginalized.

Some attribute the lack of solidarity for grassroots struggles from the KCTU to be a matter of a dominant and nationalist oriented leadership faction that dominates both the KCTU and the Democratic Labour Party, but the reasons are complex and also involve the rise of more bread and butter concerns in some of the dominant sectoral unions of the KCTU whom are affected by neoliberal restructuring, and whose concerns about job security make it difficult to organize across both place and industry.

These criticisms aside, the KCTU does remain more mobilized than national confederations in most developed countries even if it remains internally and externally fragmented, and it is important to keep this in mind. Worker’ s protests on November 11 of this year saw pitched battles between police and workers in the downtown streets of Seoul, and extreme government efforts to silence dissent such as roadblocks, water cannon, and brute force. These protests came during the yearly national day of action commemorating the death of labour activist Chun Tae Il, whose suicide during the repressive dictatorship days helped spur the largely female-led democratic trade union movement of the 1970s.

On a tragic note, the week before the protests had seen two more worker-suicides in protest of the situation of irregular workers and the new labour law. Lee So-Seon, mother of Chun Tae-il and a heroic activist of her accord, took the opportunity to criticize both the tactic itself – “Don't die any more, instead, live and fight” – and point to the lack of unity between labour and progressive groups, and lack of a progressive media, as contributing factors to the sense of despair among workers.

On a brighter note, the KCTU has been able to start to break out of enterprise level confinement and begin the slow process of establishing industrial level unions. Earlier this fall, the Korean metal workers federation announced a collective agreement that included wage negotiations not only for regular unionists but also agreements on wages and working conditions for irregular and migrant workers working in metal industries. Collective agreements have also been signed in medical and financial industries, so progress in political rights at an aggregate level among regular workers is improving but more grassroots activists within the labour movement worry about how the situation of more marginal workers without industrial or enterprise representation can remain a priority if the trade union movement becomes more concerned with sectoral issues than grassroots struggles.

Obviously there are no easy answers to these questions, gains in industrial level agreements notwithstanding, the growing majority of workers are irregular workers (recent estimates put this figure at 53% of the labour force) and in a climate of trade liberalization and labour market reform the situation for workers outside of heavy industries and strategic sectors looks difficult. Added to this is the problem of real-estate bubbles caused by financial liberalization and urban redevelopment that dramatically affect the urban poor, as has been evidenced by the struggles of venders and urban residents affected by redevelopment schemes.

It may be a bit of a cliché to say that Korean progressive movements find themselves in a crisis because of these developments. Indeed, if one looks back upon the last 30 or 40 years of the Korean labour movement, it is hard to find when a period without crisis has been the norm, but the question of how to improve the situation is not invalidated by this insight. Certainly, a large degree of the current problems can be related back to the inequality that exists between workers, citizens and the more powerful segments of Korean society.

More so, efforts by grassroots social movements to change the direction of government policy and corporate power has been further limited by the degree of participation afforded to them even by the ‘participatory government’ of Roh Moo Hyun, and the speed and scope of neoliberal reform embraced by that regime. Even those progressives from the 80s democracy movement who went into the current government have found many of their progressive reform efforts stymied both internally and by the opposition and entrenched economic bureaucracies. Thus, even the president’s more moderate former advisors have lashed out at this ‘turn to the right’. Lee Jeong Woo, former chairman of the Presidential commission of policy planning, criticized the government’s rush to sign the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement in an editorial earlier this past summer in the Hankyoreh:

The ‘‘Participatory Government’’ of Roh Moo-hyun has, over the last four years, worked in its own way to overcome a culture where ‘‘growth is everything’’ and ‘‘the market rules above all,’’ and I praise it for its efforts. The results have been a greater emphasis on harmony between growth, the re-distribution of wealth and the role of the public sector. Now, however, it is saying that it is suddenly going to trash that philosophy and go back to the familiar priorities of growth and the market. Put simply, it has turned to the right, and there ahead lies the cliff. Right now what is right for Korea is a greater turn towards the left. It is the Scandinavian social democratic model that has been judged the best of all the market economy experiments the human race has experienced so far. In public opinion surveys as well, it is the Scandinavian model that Koreans say they like the most. Though of course it would be difficult to move to that model right away, we should be gazing toward Scandinavia to get there. A free trade agreement with the U.S. means we are going to go in the wrong direction.

A “politics of solidarity”?

The broad liberal-left, however, seems at the current moment more fixated on a potential conservative conquest of political power than it is introspective on how some of this very inequality has permeated its own ranks: either in terms of the pursuit of neoliberal policy by economic reformers without the effective participation of those affected by it (which has served to eliminate much of the difference between liberals and conservatives on directions in economic policy, at least regarding labour if not trade and investment), or through neglect by more powerful and dominant actors in the political parties and union federations of grassroots struggles, often in favor of a political pre-occupation with the ‘national interest’ (in terms of ending the cold war division system) that has seen the bargaining away of much of the progressive content of the left-liberal platform and calls for progressives to unite around candidates whom seem set to pursue further neoliberal reform but have a pro-engagement stance toward the North.

Only a few on the progressive left have publicly stated that in a vibrant economic and political democracy (that could create a more viable dimension to any post-division political configuration) there needs to be more to progressive politics than furthering of neoliberal reform and the politics of growth. To this end, many hope, that whatever the results of the upcoming presidential election, a ‘politics of solidarity’ prevails on the left which puts the problem of marginalized political groups on the agenda, and includes genuine participation as a tool for achieving this – something which is going to require a genuine transformation of tendencies on the current liberal-left.

No doubt there is room for greater coordination at multiple levels between progressive forces interested in these sorts of political and economic issues, be they migrant and irregular workers’ rights or trade and financial liberalization. One place to start may be with the case with the leadership of the Migrant Trade Union currently being held in detention. Seeing as their case represents an important component of any politics of solidarity that involves the configuration of politics within and beyond national borders, it seems an appropriate place to start, perhaps both for Korean social movements and their international allies.

1. Seol, Dong-hoon et al. Survey on Undocumented Migrants in Detention Facilities of Korea. November 18,2005. National Human Rights Commission of Korea.

English Chamsesang

2007-11-29T19:21:00.000-08:00

I just noticed that Chamsesang has introduced an English website and has been building up stories in the past month. Great to see a growing diversity of english sources dealing with Korean social movement news!

International solidarity with the MTU

2007-11-28T18:13:00.000-08:00

KCTU/MTU call for action

[Photo : Emergency demonstration was held at the Seoul Regional Immigration Office on November 27th. A member of MTU was holding a picket, demanding "Free the MTU President, Bro. Kajiman and Vice-President Raju".]

Urgent Call for International Solidarity

Migrants’ Trade Union Leadership Arrested on November 27th.
Stop the Repression against KCTU affiliate Migrants’ Trade Union!
Free President Kajiman and other Imprisoned Union Officers!
Stop the Crackdown and Deportations!

1. Background

On the morning of November 27, MTU President Kajiman, Vice President Raju and General Secretary Masum were arrested, in what was clearly a targeted crackdown against the leadership of MTU. We, the KCTU and the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union call on the international labor and human rights community to do whatever in their power to secure the release of the MTU leadership and end this labor repression against MTU.
At roughly 9:20am on November 27, President Kajiman was leaving his home in order to attend a plan protest in front of Seoul Immigration Office when he was confronted by more than 10 immigration officers who had been hiding in front of his house. The immigration officers restrained the Korean activist with President Kajiman and then encircled the president. After protesting strongly, President Kajiman was eventually arrested, his shoulder hurt in the process.
General Secretary Masum also left his house the morning of the 27 in order to attend the protest in front of Seoul Immigration. As he walked down the street he was passed by four 4 large men who were laughing amongst themselves. He originally did not pay attention to them; however, immediately after roughly 10 immigration officers came up from behind him. He was suddenly surrounded by nearly 20 people and despite protesting was eventually arrested.
At roughly the same time Vice President Raju was confronted by 4 immigration officers in front of the factory where he worked. Upon seeing the vice president, the immigration officers immediately attempted to handcuff him, but failed due to his forceful protest. When Vice President Raju demanded to see the officers’ identification cards, they presented them along with a prepared detention order. Despite his protests the vice president was also eventually arrested.
Soon after all three men were sent to a detention center in Cheongju, Northern Choongjeong Provience, south of the capital Seoul.

2. Clear Labor Repression

The simultaneous arrest of three MTU leaders, is a clearly a targeted attack, planed in timing with an intensification of the crackdown against undocumented migrants in South Korea. Since the beginning of August of this year, the government has carried out a mass-scale crackdown in an attempt to reduce the number of undocumented migrants in the country. During this time more than 20 MTU members and officers have been arrested.
By their own admission, despite this crackdown, the numbers have not significantly decreased. Thus, Immigration Control has stepped up the crackdown in the last several weeks. At the same time a proposal is being put forth to revise South Korea’s immigration law to make it completely legal to carry out the crackdown continuously without any procedures, such as requiring warrants or detention orders, to protect the human rights of the people it targets. The government has clearly stepped up its repression against MTU leadership at this moment in order to get rid of the force that has been at the forefront of the struggle against the crackdown.

3. Call for Solidarity

We, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and affiliate the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union, make an urgent appeal to you to do whatever you can to support our struggle to free the arrested union leaders and end the barbaric crackdown underway in South Korea.

In particular we are calling for protest letters to the Ministry of Justice, Minister Jung Seong-Jin +82-2-503-3532 or +82-2-500-9128.

Please be sure to send a copy to KCTU by +82-2-2635-1134(fax) or e-mail at inter@kctu.org

We wish you also to know that KCTU and MTU are by no means deterred by this attack. MTU has already selected a temporary leadership and we have already planned protests for the next days. We are currently making further preparations and will mobilize every means possible to win the release of MTU’s leaders.

If you have any questions or need more information, please contact:

Lee Changgeun
International Executive Director
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions
Tel.: +82-2-2670-9234 Fax: +82-2-2635-1134
E-mail: inter@kctu.org Web-site : http://kctu.org
2nd Fl. Daeyoung Bld., 139 Youngdeungpo-2-ga, Youngdeungpo-ku, Seoul 150-032 Korea

Liem Wol-san
International Coordinator
Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants' Trade Union(MTU)-affiliated to KCTU
Tel : +82-2--2285-6068
Email: migrant@jinbo.net Website: http://mtu.or.kr

SAMPLE LETTER

Mr. Jung Seong-Jin
Minister of Justice
Seoul, South Korea

Dear Minister Jung,

On the morning of November 27 between 9:00 and 9:30, the president, vice president and general secretary of the KCTU affiliate, Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon Migrants’ Trade Union, were arrested, each in front of his separate home or workplace. This event has already received international attention. It is clear from the form in which the arrests took place that this was a targeted crackdown meant to silence MTU and the opposition struggle it has lead against the anti-human rights crackdown being carried out against undocumented migrants in South Korea. That this was a meditated act of repression is also apparent from the fact that the arrests came at the same time as the South Korean Immigration Control Office is stepping up its crackdown and a proposal is being put forth the revise immigration law to make it possible to carry out the crackdown continuously with complete disregard for the most basic procedures to protect human rights.

The arrests of the MTU leadership is a gross violation of human rights and a horrendous act of labor repression which targets not only migrant workers and MTU but also the KCTU, the 15 million workers it represents and the international labor community. As such, we will not remain silent.

We therefore forcefully call on you to meet the following demands:
-Immediately release President Kajiman, Vice President Raju and General Secretary Masum!
-Stop the targeted crackdown and labor repression against MTU!
-Stop the crackdown and deportation of undocumented migrant workers!

Signed,

Hankyoreh editorial on the crackdown

2007-11-27T23:03:00.000-08:00

[Editorial] Stop the crackdown on migrant workers

Another reckless crackdown on migrant workers is underway. Yesterday three key officers in the Migrants’ Trade Union (Iju Nodongja Nodong Johap) were taken away by immigration agents. The three were clearly targeted. Just the other day two ethnic Koreans from China jumped off the roof of a Chinese speaking church in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, while trying to ditch agents there to arrest them, who then broke their legs and ankles. For how much longer is the government going to continue this inhumane crackdown?

The reason the government is going after foreign laborers with such zeal is said to be because of the rapid increase in the number of undocumented migrant workers. This kind of ruthless crackdown, however, is as bad a policy as one could have. There are said to be some 230,000 undocumented migrant laborers in Korea; is the government going to continue this way until it has grabbed them all?

An even greater problem is that earlier this month the government revised the Immigration Law to allow agents to question foreigners based on suspicion alone, without regard to time and place, further angering migrant workers. It is not that one cannot understand wanting to provide in the law some tools to work with while enforcing it, but it is a problem when the law just gives agents wide-ranging authority and includes no stipulations on procedures.

A law governing the national police requires that a police officer present identification and identify himself when stopping someone for questioning. Similarly, at the very least, immigration officials need to be required to prove who they are. It was in 2005 that the National Human Rights Commission officially recommended that immigration be given clear conditions, parameters on authority, and procedures for arresting illegal aliens.

Has the government already forgotten the appeal and recommendation issued by their Korean brethren in Germany? Eleven Koreans who went as migrant workers to Germany 30 to 40 years ago issued a statement earlier this month in which they said “all migrants should be recognized as members of society and granted rights that correspond to residents.” The government needs to take this suggestion into consideration and reexamine its proposed revision to the Immigration Law, then come up with a reasonable policy alternative that, instead of being all about cracking down, is enough to make our society feel some sense of pride about our immigration policies.

Breaking news: MTU leaders arrested

2007-11-27T10:32:00.000-08:00

I got a few worried emails last night and thought I would start publishing things now.

Basically, in the midst of increasing crackdowns on migrant workers, MTU (Migrant Worker's Trade Union) President (Kajiman), Vice president (Raju) and General Secretary (Masum) were all arrested at 9:30am Korean time this morning (November 27) in front of their homes/workplaces. They were arrested without any formal charges and are being held at a detention center in Jeon-ju. Since then, MTU activists and other groups are currently meeting with the KCTU to discuss the situation and decide upon further action. MWTV and CINA have been reporting upon the events in English.

I heard from Masum's partner that he was arrested in front of their house. 15 people/officials met him on the street and he said they had all of the documents and knew his name. No one was hurt.

The Korean Democratic Labour Party, Solidarity for Social Progress, a national Irregular Workers Solidarity group, and others have released statements of solidarity (in Korean) in the short hours since this started.

More information to follow.