SEOUL — The May 31 to June 4 general strike by South Korean workers has deepened differences between the reformist Democratic Labour Party (DLP) and militants seeking to build a counter-offensive against President Kim Dae Jung's neo-liberal attacks. The Power of the Working Class (PWC), which has begun to regroup the latter into a fighting political opposition to the DLP, points to several fundamental problems encountered in the strike.
The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), which called the strike, formally raised three demands: reduction of the working week from 44 hours (5.5 days) to 40 (five days); an end to restructuring (including the restoration of collective bargaining and pre-International Monetary Fund restructuring wage levels); and the upgrading of casuals to permanent status. Of these, the DLP-aligned leadership focused on only the first demand, which they considered the easiest to obtain concessions on.
Even before the strike, Kim had promised to consider a five-day week. But this is because a five-day week would coincide with the wishes of the large employers, who see it as part of their overall restructuring plans. However, Kim has not given any guarantees — even rhetorical ones — against trade-offs, such as cuts to wages and holidays. The bosses are assuming, of course, that a reduction of hours will be accompanied by a reduction of pay.
The KCTU is at present insisting on no trade-offs, (it would be suicide to do otherwise), but it remains to be seen how this crucial difference will be played out. There is speculation that the leadership will accept a pay cut but maintain a fighting posture by demanding what the government has already offered: a fund for the labour movement created from the amount of wages traded off. This fund looks likely to be controlled by a tripartite commission of government, big business and labour federations.
No leadership
According to the PWC, there is a deeper issue here. While the DLP focused on the question of shorter working hours, the more vital questions for rank-and-file workers were encapsulated in the other two demands. It has been the deep-seated anger against economic restructuring and increasing casualisation that has fuelled the latest round of workplace negotiations.
Instead of concentrating and directing workers' anger and energy into struggling for all three demands, the KCTU apparatus focused on meetings with government and business. It did little to organise the general strike, thereby neglecting its unique positioning to coordinate the whole of the independent labour movement.
Individual unions were left on their own to use the annual negotiations to fight, workplace by workplace, for the last two demands. (Even then, the workers won the third demand — the upgrading of casual workers to permanent — in several areas, most notably the hospitals.)
Those individual unions that turned to strike action simply agreed to act at a particular point during the general strike period. Hence the daily number of strikers did not exceed 70,000 during the five-day strike period; the total KCTU membership is about 500,000. And even the 70,000 figure is deceptive: it includes those who struck for just part of a day and those who merely attended stop-work meetings.
Without effective KCTU leadership, individual strikes merely coincided with the dates of the "general" strike. As much as many militants in individual unions would have liked to organise and lead a fighting general strike, they were not in a practical position to do so. Only the KCTU would have been able to do this.
Even at the level of appearances, the general strike proved limp. The five-day action was to culminate in a rally and march on Sunday, June 4, with the turnout conservatively forecast at 50,000. In fact, only 15,000 participated.
Moreover, it was a generally submissive affair, with KCTU officials attempting to suppress spontaneous worker resistance to provocative police actions. The police blocked the participation of a fleet of taxi drivers in the march and allowed general traffic into a lane of the route during the march.
Street fights against the police are basic features of a movement that, over many years, has had to physically win and defend the right to mass street action. So, despite the KCTU officials, the workers stopped the police from barring the taxi drivers' participation on June 4.
Cooption
Most tellingly, there was almost no participation by the traditional front line of the independent labour movement: workers from the automobile plants, shipbuilding yards, subways and Korean Telecom. The metalworkers pushed into the front line this time were from small and middle workshops, by no means the gigantic fist of workers from the huge conglomerates who have spearheaded real general strikes in the past.
Predictably, the Kim government has directed its sweetest charm toward the leaderships of the most militant sections of the Korean working class. The struggle to elevate the consciousness of the movement from a trade union level to a political one has, at least for now, been deviated by cooption by the capitalist state.
At its basest, this was demonstrated by the KCTU's pre-strike demand of 18 billion won (about US$16 million) in government funding, on the grounds that as a legal organisation it deserves government assistance. Kim did not reject this demand out of hand; he made his answer contingent on how the strike panned out.
The main problem with the general strike, then, was not so much the KCTU's almost exclusive focus on the shorter hours demand, but that this central organisation of workers did not build a real general strike. After all, the battles against casualisation and IMF austerity can be hinged around the demand for shorter hours with no trade-offs. But, because the general strike was not genuine, even the demand for shorter hours may now be sunk by an unprincipled compromise.
BY IGGY KIM