For most employers, labor unions are troublesome. For some, they are far worse than a mere annoyance to even become an archenemy. One of such employers is the retail giant Shinsegae Group.
According to ``internal documents” obtained and revealed by some opposition lawmakers, E-mart, Korea’s largest discount outlet chain and owned by Shinsegae Group, has done literally everything it can to keep its employees from forming unions and break up existing ones.
Its managers, for instance, have classified workers into five groups by their loyalty to the company and monitored those prone to making or joining unions 24 hours a day. The papers even contained the most personal traits of those on the blacklist, such as their drinking capacity and dating partners.
Once categorized as requiring special management, workers faced demotion or other discrimination such as relocation to faraway branches. A guideline sent from the discount chain’s parent group calls for spreading vicious rumors about union organizers until the victims offer to quit. About 150 E-mart employees left the firm in this way. A company document described one of the union heads it pushed out as ``our biggest enemy.”
More surprisingly, E-mart has committed all these infringements on basic labor rights with the cooperation of various government agencies. Officials at the police, the National Intelligence Service and the Fair Trade Commission all provided information on the movements of listed workers or ignored the company’s egregious violations in return for periodic gifts of cash and other goods.
Most astonishing of all was the behavior the labor ministry. Its mission is to protect and further the rights and opportunities of working people but what it has done was exactly the opposite. In its advice to E-mart managers in dealing with the deaths of four employees in 2011 caused by unsafe working conditions, the ministry said, ``Disappoint bereaved families at least three times before offering them some money in funeral subsidies.” It’s little surprise then that some ministry officials censured, not consoled, workers at automotive firms protesting in steel tower asking, ``What the hell are they doing up there?”
These are the scenes of labor repression, a joint production of government and big businesses, in 21st century Korea.
We hope it will be different in the next government led by a president who has vowed to put people’s constitutional rights and their happiness ahead of all else. One of the foremost tasks President-elect Park Geun-hye should tackle upon taking office is to restore the labor ministry to its original state, and have it play its supposed role: cracking down on labor oppressors starting with E-mart.