Korean workers will fight IMF plans

Submitted by Anon on 13 January, 1998 - 12:32

Paul Field, who visited South Korea during the January 1997 general strike and again in November 1997, spoke to Alan McArthur about the state of the Korean workers’ movement as it braces itself for an assault following the country’s economic crisis

There is a stand-off developing in South Korea: who bears the brunt for the crisis, workers or bosses? In the short term, strikes are certainly possible. There’s an analogy with Britain at the end of the 70s. They’re going to deflate the economy, there are going to be big redundancies, they’re going to force mergers and acquisitions and closures. There is going to be a massive attempted rationalisation of the workforce. The law has had to be reformed to allow more foreign imports and investment. Companies with huge debts they can’t pay have to close or be bought out and redundancies made. The government wants to ban strikes in whole sectors of the economy. It’s going to be dreadful if it goes through.

In the middle of December Kwon Yong-kil, the trade-union leader who was contesting Korea’s presidential election, publicly shaved his head as a declaration of war on the government and the cuts. This was the positive side of his campaign that activists are now looking to build on. A new layer of activists is coming forward after the general strike last January, even despite the reprisals and intimidation since the strike. In the Hyundai Trade Union Federation, which is one of the biggest federations, that new layer is starting to take positions in the union.

The decision for Kwon Yong-kil to stand in the presidential election was taken late in the day, in late September. It came after a long debate in the trade union movement and progressive movement about whether to stand a candidate. Kwon is the head of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the illegal or semi-legal federation of democratic unions which led last January’s general strike.

The KCTU is the product of successive unifications of the democratic unions that, despite state repression, came out of, and managed to survive after, the democracy struggles against the military dictatorship in 1987. Along with key industrial unions, such as car workers and metalworkers, there are also white collar unions in the KCTU, teachers’ and journalists’ unions. Kwon was a journalist. He was based in Paris for ten years as a broadcasting correspondent.

The KCTU organises maybe two or three percent of South Korean workers. That’s in the face of repression, you have to bear in mind. Membership went up by about 10 percent to 600,000 in the wake of the general strike, out of a workforce of 30m. But the democratic unions organise workers in such key export industries that they can have a real impact. And the general strike proved they have extremely widespread support.
It’s illegal for trade unions to form a political party in South Korea, so Kwon’s supporters set up a paper party, Peoples’ Victory for the 21st Century. Significantly, they got the support of one of the main democracy movements from the 1987 struggles, the longest standing campaign, the National Alliance for Democracy and Reunification of Korea (NADRK) — although its influence has certainly declined. [NADRK has about 55,000 members.] This support was the legacy of alliances built in the general strike.
The campaign couldn’t have direct funding from or involvement of trade unions — although it was mainly individual trade unionists involved in the campaigning, and various workers’ rallies did become election rallies.

The campaign received a lot of harassment from the state, including threats of arrest. They hadn’t declared a proper party, to get around the issue of a labour party being illegal. Then the state said it was illegal for an independent to stand, that they must declare themselves as a formal party or disband. Of course, they couldn’t be a labour party, so they were caught in a catch 22, hassled continually.

Money was a real problem, too. They needed £600,000. Elections are taken very seriously in South Korea and cost a fortune. People will spend £6,000 just to get elected to students’ unions. The campaign couldn’t get money directly from trade unions or it would be closed down. So there were real problems.

There was also the self-imposed problem that they didn’t decide to run until late September. There was no worked out platform or manifesto, which admittedly is the way in Korean bourgeois politics: it’s very centred around individuals. But the programme was very vague; you had to draw it out of speeches and statements in interviews where Kwon would set out a broad formal position. There was no detailed policy. The broad policy was not even social democratic in the politics of it. You could even call it Blairite — although they did call for some kind of welfare provision, which was the most progressive thing they were saying.

What was significant was that it was the first time the unions didn’t support a liberal, bourgeois candidate like Kim Dae-jung, who won the election. Even the democratic trade unions would have supported him in the past. Kim has had a populist image. He has personally struggled and sacrificed a lot in the democracy struggles up to 1987. He survived two assassination attempts, has been arrested, exiled and so forth.

Kim cast himself, even explicitly, as a sort of Nelson Mandela figure. He’s always had dialogue with trade unionists but had no formal links or accountability. A bourgeois, reform candidate, he moved significantly to the right to get elected, and did a deal with quite reactionary forces — even the man who tried to kill him in the 70s, the former director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

Korean politics of the last 20 years has been dominated by the so-called Three Kims who came out of the 70s: Kim Young-sam of the New Korea Party, the previous president, a former democrat under the dictatorship quite happy to keep that repression in place when he had power, now held up as a failure; Kim Dae-jung, who was always a marginal figure struggling against the dictatorship; and Kim Jong-pil, who was linked with the Park dictatorship in the 70s, and the most conservative and reactionary one.

In this election the two Kims from the left and the right did a deal. One thing that Kim Dae-jung did that upset a lot of people was to say he would grant an amnesty to President Chun, who was the militaristic dictator in the 80s, and to Roh Tae-woo, who was his right hand man. They were responsible for the massacre of 5,000 people at Kwangju in 1980.

Kim Dae-jung was constantly comparing himself to Nelson Mandela. He said we need truth and reconciliation in South Korea in the way they had it in South Africa. He was able to get the areas of his strongest support to back him. He even got 92% of the vote in the region around Kwangju, where the massacre took place.

The state unions [the state (and US)-sponsored Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), organises 1.2m workers] supported Kim Dae-jung, even though they supported the general strike last year, albeit in a limited way. Quite a few unions defected from the FKTU to the KCTU after the strike, such as the biggest banking union. Many workers will have voted for Kim Dae-jung tactically, to get rid of Kim Young-sam. A large number have illusions in him that will have to be overcome.

Kwon Yong-kil’s election campaign failed to make any real impact on the process, polling only about two percent of the vote. Why? The late candidacy, and also the fact that it was quite an apolitical campaign. A lot of the best forces on the left (not the Stalinists but the best forces) — were initially very reluctant about going into the campaign.

NADRK formed a bloc with the most conservative elements of the KCTU and dominated the politics of the presidential campaign. The more dissident, left-wing forces didn’t really have a voice in the way it was run. They ran a Tony Blair-style campaign, even namechecking him, which apart from anything else is stupid politics. It makes some sense for someone like Blair to suck up to the Establishment and run a populist, reactionary campaign, as he was in a position to win power. But when the aim was to make an impact on the process and gain a profile, Kwon should have played on his working class credentials. All the posters pictured Kwon in a suit rather than on the demonstrations last January.

The KCTU response to the economic crisis has been much more encouraging in terms of the prospects of setting up a workers’ party than the election campaign in general. The fact that they didn’t support Kim Dae-jung and spoke out against the International Monetary Fund plan means that they are much more able to put demands on him as the IMF package [the IMF has put together a $60 billion loan deal to try to bail out the South Korean economy] translates itself into cuts and job losses. The IMF is also insisting on labour laws being tightened, a threat the general strike had beaten back. [The bouncing through parliament of anti-union legislation is what sparked the general strike.] The KCTU has staked its independence.

It has called for a national public debate on who is responsible for the crisis, and said it will oppose all redundancies. It is also calling for the creation of a welfare state, so that workers don’t bear the burden of the crisis. It has sent a letter to the IMF and the US government, detailing an alternative strategy.

As the general strike last January showed, support for the democratic unions goes way beyond their actual membership. They were getting 65 percent support in polls. Translating that politically is difficult — because of money, because of a lack of any kind of tradition in these things.

At the time the campaign was set up the more left-wing youth groups and student groups, and a sort of think-tank that has close links with the metalworkers’ union (which is one of the more politically radical class struggle unions), wouldn’t support the campaign as the politics were too liberal and populist. They set up a committee which at first had an abstentionist position. But people persuaded them to support the campaign in return for some of the slogans being changed. They got “For Prosperity and Happiness” changed to “For Democracy and Progress,” which, particularly in the Korean language, has much more political resonance.

There is very little in the way of a revolutionary left, beyond a few think-tanks who I think have independent Marxist politics. There is a small British SWP-sponsored group, which is mainly students and has little impact. Because of the dictatorship there is very little of any kind of socialist tradition; it’s not a language imbued into the labour movement in the way it is in Britain, say.

It is a very complex picture but the next few months will see big struggles over lay-offs and redundancies imposed in line with the IMF’s conditions for loans, and that will be the acid test. What the state have failed to do in the past with repression and riot police they are now trying to do with economics.

There is a real union-busting zeal among the government. They have also tried to isolate and break the student movement. There are 5,000 students in prison. Some workers have illusions in Kim Dae-jung. He will find it hard to turn his back on his history of struggle and remain credible. An analogy is if Nelson Mandela had had to face down the unions immediately, not very gradually as he has done.

The most important thing is that although the politics weren’t very radical, Kwon’s was an independent campaign. It puts the democratic unions — which do organise by far the most class conscious and militant element of the working class — in a much more powerful position to oppose the government than before.

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