CINA

It’s 'WAR'!!.. 

..militant union declares after Lee snub
Umbrella group to target E.Land over worker layoffs

 
It looks like war is brewing between militant trade unionists and an incoming administration that identifies itself as overtly pro-business.

“Lee Myung-bak’s decision to cancel his meeting with me is a declaration of war against us,” Lee Seok-haeng, chairman of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, told the JoongAng Ilbo yesterday.
 

Stung by Lee pulling out of a meeting with the union’s leadership, the militant group said the first battleground will be the retail giant E.Land’s policies on non-regular workers.

 
E.Land has been a choice target for months since the company decided to fire non-regular workers rather than convert their status to permanent under new government labor regulations.

“We have no choice but to counter his [Lee’s] decision in our own way,” Lee Seok-haeng said of the president-elect’s snub. “The first flash bomb will be shot high into the sky from E.Land.”

 
The rift was aggravated Monday after Lee canceled the planned meeting. Citing the union leader’s unwillingness to cooperate with a police investigation into illegal street rallies staged last year, the president-elect indefinitely delayed the meeting.
The union, which represents more than 750,000 workers, said its efforts to sabotage the operation of E.Land’s Homever, New Core and Kim’s Club outlets nationwide will continue until Sunday.
 

According to the confederation, up to 200 members will be sent to 62 E.Land outlets to block customers from entering. The plan is expected to hurt the retailer on the eve of the Lunar New Year shopping period.

 
Chairman Lee yesterday visited the confederation’s Seoul headquarters to encourage members to fight.

 
“All our actions will be within the framework of law and order,” Kim Dong-wu, a KCTU official in charge of non-regular workforce policy, said yesterday. “Public opinion is favorable to the fired working moms, so the stores can be easily boycotted with only a few protesters standing out front.”

The militant umbrella union will also push forward other scheduled activities. Chairman Lee will visit the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations to seek cooperation from the largest U.S. umbrella union to stop the two countries’ free trade agreement. Lee will also meet with Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to lobby against the trade accord.

In March, Chairman Lee will visit labor unions around Korea to urge labor unity. In June, the union has already scheduled routine summertime fights against management. “No matter what the president-elect says, we will go our own way as planned,” Lee said...
  

http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2885721

About the background story please read:

☞ President-Elect Cancels Meeting With Union (K. Times, 1.28)

☞ Lee’s cancellation of meeting with KCTU.. (Hankyoreh, 1.29)

☞ Why Won’t the Union Leader Talk to Police? (Chosun Ilbo/"editorial", 1.30)

Last week started on Sunday (1.20) with a - unfortunately - small protest rally/demo against the ongoing crackdown policy by the S.K. gov't against "un-documented" migrant workers in general and MTU activists in particular.

 
Here you can watch a MWTV video about the event:

☞ [1.20] 이주노동자 집회

Last Thursday evening the weekly candlelight protest near Gwanghwamun in downtown Seoul took place. Few hours before, in the afternoon, some activists protested in front of the Immigration Detention Center near Hwaseong (south of Seoul) against the imprisonment of comrade Suwash (pics about it you can see here). 

And finally a few MTU activists and their supporters joined the "1.26 Int'l Action Day" rally and demo in Seoul (BTW, also here also only a very small number of activists took the streets to "Act together for another world - A world without poverty, war and discrimination"). Just see following two pics (MTU activists on the rally):

For more about last week's activities, please check out following:

☞ 1.20, 이주노동자.. 대회(이주탄압분쇄 비대위/ECSRAM)

☞ [1월 20일] 이주노동자.. 대회 (다함께)

☞ 1.24 촛불문화제, 1.26 세계공동행동.. (이주탄압분쇄 비대위)

☞ 1.26 세계행동의 날.. (다함께)

☞ 인터넷1인시위!!^^

Conservatives Downgrade Jeju Uprising in 1948

Some conservative civic groups have called for a ``reevaluation'' of the April 3 Jeju Resistance Movement as a communist uprising instead of massacre by the government, and are causing quite a stir among Jeju residents.

The New Right Union, the Korean Veteran Association and 16 other conservative groups agreed to hold campaigns from Jan. 29 calling for the incident that took place in 1948 on Jeju Island to be reevaluated.

The move comes after Lee Myung-bak's presidential transition team decided to abolish the National Committee for the Investigation of the Truth About the Jeju April 3 Incident, established under a special law to look into the event.

The committee members as well as Jeju residents said the team's decision was obnoxious, as some villages saw half of their inhabitants killed. They said the truth has yet to be revealed, and the plan was a step back from verification.

The Jeju Resistance Movement occurred during the post-liberation period when Korea was a single nation. Historians say there were conflicts between the leftist umbrella South Korea Labor Party and pro-U.S. politicians. The two sides clashed throughout 1947 on Jeju when the labor party planned protests against the national referendum to establish a separate Korean government in the southern half of the peninsula.

On April 3, 1948, the leftist party members allegedly attacked police stations to gain power, while the provisional government allegedly arrested everyone on the spot and killed them later.

The alleged death toll is said to have been 25,000-30,000, one-10th of the island's population. The resistance continued until 1954, even after the referendum and the South Korean government was established.

The Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations have acknowledged 2,778 deceased as official victims. Moreover, President Roh made a public apology to Jeju residents on behalf of the authorities in 2006.

However, some conservatives have said the resistance has much to be reviewed. ``Though many civilians died, the essence of the event was communists orchestrating an uprising to dominate Korea,'' a conservative group member said...

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2008/01/117_17945.html

Related (to the Jeju Massacre):

☞ Cheju 4.3 Massacre.. (a collection of articles, analyses, reports by Kimsoft)

☞ Cheju Uprising (wikipedia)

..The situation in the DLP (after the presidential election)

The most obviously disappointing outcome of the elections is that virtually none of Roh’s disappointed former supporters went to the left and the Democratic Labour Party did rather badly (although perhaps not as badly as some think, since it retained its support base in some key areas). This seems perplexing considering the considerable strength of the movements against the Korea-US FTA, the continued use of South Korean troops in Iraq and the mass casualisation of the Korean workforce under Roh. For answers to this question you might want to look at the various intelligent analyses in the Counterfire newspaper (in Korean). One important factor to bear in mind is that the misfortunes, defeats and scandals that have beset the KCTU (main left union federation) in recent years have obviously had an impact on the credibility of the DLP since it basically originated as the political wing of the federation and is still very close to it.

Whatever the reasons for the DLP’s poor showing (and they are undoubtedly multiple), it has been the trigger for an internal crisis that is threatening to split the party. It would be a mistake however, to think that these divisions within the DLP are something new - it has always been an amalgam of very different factions. And the tensions between the two main factions came to the surface very clearly before in late 2006 when the Roh administration sought to use a supposed ’spy ring’ within the party as a scapegoat in the febrile atmosphere after North Korea’s nuclear weapon test.

I’m sure I would be accused of being overly simplistic if I described the current split as being along the lines of the old ‘NL’ (National Liberation) and ‘PD’ (People’s Democracy) factions of the 80s and 90s, although there is some truth in this. Basically, as far as I can make out, the more moderate factions (i.e. more rightwing and more social democratic factions) in the party along with some sectarian radical left elements, under the general banner of the ‘Equality Faction’ (평등파/P’yongdungp’a - including many former PD people) are attempting to get rid of the more old fashioned left-nationalist ‘Independence Faction’ (자주파/Chajup’a - basically NL), or split the party if they cannot achieve this. The P’yongdungp’a accuse the Chajup’a of being in thrall to North Korea (종북주의) and exercising undue dominance over the party. Many big hitters both within the DLP as well as some on the outside are now openly calling for the founding of a new party, presumably purged of those power-hungry pro-North elements.

As the analysis in Counterfire by Kim Ha-young points out, this faction fight is not really about the supposed pro-North leanings of the dominant Chajup’a faction (they weren’t considered a problem before, so why now?), but has more to do with a simple power struggle within the party as well as a desire, among some at least, to move the party in a rightward direction. The basic fact is that the coming South Korean government, like all those before it, will use the accusation of being pro-North whenever it wants to physically suppress the left or simply smear its image. And this will happen whether or not the DLP purges its (rather mildly) pro-North Chajup’a elements.

Clearly both sides in this battle for the DLP are not without their political problems, but the Korean working class and the left in general will be immensely stronger in the tough months and years ahead if it has a single, united left party to articulate its interests in the political arena. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as though this will be the case...

http://kotaji.blogsome.com/2008/01/17/election-fallout-and-falling-out/

Related stuff:

☞ DLP.. #4