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Locking up trade union leaders did not help E.Land suppress workers' action:

Shop workers and their union threatened with huge fines if sit-in strikes continue

 

Thousand US Dollars - that is the fine which an E.Land employee has to pay if she participates in a new sit-in strike. For most Homever, NewCore and Kim's Club supermarket cashiers and shop workers, this is more than they earn in an entire month. Or actually, have earned, before their employer decided to sack them and outsource their jobs, to save money.

 

The Korean retail chain, established and controlled by self-proclaimed religious Christian mecenate Park Song-su, is now tightening the screw on its own workers. Having perhaps overstretched itself by buying Carrefour's chain of 32 hypermarkets last year, the company is now looking at cutting labour costs.

 

When E.Land announced mass dismissals of its non-regular workers earlier this year, its workers' trade union wanted to negotiate. But the retailer persisted, saying that it will outsource the jobs rather than to comply with a new law that would have required it to give these employees a regular contract.

 

The sit-in strikes that followed were quashed through massive riot police interventions. Crying supermarket cashiers and other shop workers were dragged away to police stations in the Korean capital, where three union leaders are still being held.

 

But the workers persisted. They are literally fighting for their futures, and for their families. The social safety net in Korea is non-existent and unemployment would lead to human catastrophies. There are many single mothers and sole bread-winners among the dismissed E.Land workers, for whom even the very low wages that the company pays them provides the basic means of living.

 

Now, Mr Park Song-su and his company are descending ever harder on these young women and girls. They are supported by a right-wing government which openly defies the ILO principles of freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.

 

Apparently, locking up the three top E.Land workers' trade union leaders in a police prison did not help Park Song-su and his company to suppress the workers' reaction to E.Land's mass dismissals. New measures were called for. Once again, instead of negotiating an agreement, the Korean retailer went to the authorities for help.

 

10 million Won, or 10.000 US Dollars, is the fine which a Korean court has levied on the E.Land workers' trade union, at the request of E.Land, would there be yet another sit-in strike. And every participating worker would be fined 1 million Won, or 1,000 US Dollars.

 

No wonder that conservative media in Seoul are applauding from the sidelines.

 

On the positive side one can see a growing awareness among parts of the Korean public about what is happening to the E.Land shop workers. Civic organisations are building up their support, lawyers and academics are speaking out against the repression, and medical doctors are attending to the striking workers.

 

Also the highest international authority on labour relations, the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation ILO, seems to be losing its patience. As a previous urgent request for the government to ensure the release of the detained trade union leaders have not been answered, the Director General of ILO Juan Somavia has once again intervened formally with the Labour Minister.

 

If E.Land and the government are serious about the need for the employer and the union to reach a negotiated solution, then the place of these elected union leaders is not in a police cell but at the bargaining table.

 

UNI Commerce has been engaged in an active support of the E.Land workers' struggle for their jobs ever since the conflict flared up. Actually, there is a long history of close cooperation with the Carrefour workers' trade union, which now is part of the E.Land union, after the corporate take-over in Korea and the renaming of the hypermarkets into Homever stores.

 

This support will continue.

For more stories and pictures on the E.Land workers' struggle, go to the dedicated UNI Commerce webpage:

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