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Company owner Park Song-Su remains quiet and lets others do dirty work:





They don't give up their fight against mass dismissals and outsourcing their jobs. Last Sunday, E.Land workers once again staged a sit-in strike at the NewCore shop complex in Kangnam in central Seoul. This morning, the 260 striking workers were evicted by 4,600 riot police, arrested, and taken to police stations around the Korean capital. Korean labour legislation reportedly restricts picketing and other strike action to the workplaces themselves. It is hard to see why a strike cannot take place at a commerce workplace such as a retail store.

 

Early Tuesday morning, 4,600 Korean riot police stormed into E.Land's Kangnam NewCore department store in central Seoul where 260 shop workers were staging a sit-in strike. The predominantly young women cashiers and other store employees were dragged away to waiting police buses and taken to police stations in the Korean capital.

 

Outside the shopping complex, hundreds of supporters from trade unions, civic groups and student organisations had held an overnight cultural event to protect the picketing workers against a forced police intervention. Inside, E.Land's management had assembled hundreds of thugs hired from specialised manpower firms, some head office staff, and discontent small shop owner tenants, prepared to confront the striking employees.

 

Korean labour legislation reportedly restricts picketing and other strike action to the workplaces themselves. It is hard to see why a strike cannot take place at a commerce workplace, such as a retail store.

 

Reacting against the forced police intervention in support of the company, the president of the E.Land-NewCore workers' trade union Park Yang-Soo once again called for immediate negotiations between management and the workers, without pre-set conditions.

E.Land refused to negotiate seriously and called the police instead

The E.Land workers' trade union has tried for several months already to get management to negotiate an agreement on how part-time workers and workers with time limited contracts could be given more secure employment conditions. This is foreseen by a new law on the protection of non-regular workers, which came into force on 1 July. Many large employers, including leading Korean retailers, have already taken steps to give employees a regular status.

 

Having first refused any talks, the company finally sat down at the negotiating table only after pressure from government and public opinion. Even after that, there have been no serious efforts on their side to reach an accommodation with the workers. Instead, E.Land has focused on pushing the government to intervene with riot police and imprisonment of the company's trade union leaders, in order to break the strike and to weaken the union.

 

E.Land owner Song Park is quiet and lets managers do the dirty work

 

The company's founder and owner Park Song-Su (Songs Park), who likes to pride himself with being a devout Christian mecenate, has been conspicuously quiet during the whole conflict. When E.Land clamped down on its workers and their trade union already some years ago, Mr Park was reportedly abroad during that time. Again, he is said to have left the country to let the employed management do the dirty work of breaking the workers' opposition to the mass dismissals.

 

Mr Park's company bought Carrefour's Korean subsidiary and its 32 hypermarkets last year, reportedly for 1,5 Billion US Dollars. At the time, this raised questions about how the relatively small textile retailer can manage a huge take-over such as this. It seems that the buy-out which apparently was heavily leveraged has put a huge strain on the retailer. Instead of admitting this and cooperating with his personnel to find solutions, Mr Park has directed his management to clamp down on labour costs, victimising the company's low-paid non-regular workers.

 

E.Land was forced to retreat on substance issues

 

E.Land has already been forced to pull back from many of the measures that it took with regard to employment conditions.

 

The outsourcing of NewCore Outlet cashiers seems to have backfired as a large part of them refused to accept the decision, and the company has difficulties in securing competent staff to replace them.

 

Hundreds of dismissals of former Carrefour hypermarket workers now have to be recalled as it has been shown that E.Land used a false version of the collective agreement signed by the French retailer shortly before it handed over the store chain, now called Homever. As part of E.Land's commitment to take over the Carrefour staff, the signed collective agreement protected some 3,000 non-regular workers who had reached 18 months of service, against dismissal. Management tried to contend that the clause covered only the 170 workers in this category who were unionised at the time.

 

Only when the E.Land workers' trade union, with the help of UNI Commerce, was able to show that the employer referred to an incorrect text did the company accept its obligations under the signed collective agreement. It is still to be seen whether this extends to a reversal of the lay-offs that have already been made.

 

It would seem to be quite possible for the company and its workers' trade union to reach an agreement on the substance issues themselves. Remaining differences are not that big, and the union has repeatedly declared and shown its preparedness to compromise. But its has become clear that E.Land has another agenda.

 

E.Land wants to destroy union with government support

 

E.Land is now out to destroy its workers' trade union in what is emerging as one of the dirtiest union-busting campaigns ever seen. In doing this, they are supported by a wavering but friendly and cooperative government, which readily accommodates the company's requests for riot police intervention and repression. The playing field is heavily slanted in the retailer's favour, and many government representatives don't even hide their views that the workers should just accept the mass lay-offs and all other management decisions.

 

An important part of employer strategy has been to lock up the main leaders of its trade union, to weaken the E.Land workers' capacity to negotiate. When their trade union confederation KCTU came in to support the struggle, it was heavily attached by the government and its labour minister as a 'third party' intervention. Apparently, the company and its friends in government had not counted on a broad labour support for the strike. Instead they must have thought that it would be easy to get out of the difficult situation by putting enough pressure on the workers and their workplace and company level union structures.

 

E.Land union leaders remain in jail as ILO appeals are ignored

 

Today, three elected E.Land workers' trade union leaders remain detained inside the Mapo police station in Seoul. Interventions by the International Labour Organisation ILO and Union Network International UNI calling for a release of them, to make free and fair collective bargaining negotiations possible, have not lead to any results.

 

Instead, also other E.Land unionists are threatened by arrest and huge compensation claims have been filed by the employer, to recover the costs of the strike action, but above all to destroy the union and to allow them to dismiss the unionised workers.

 

UNI Commerce and its affiliates, supported by the whole of UNI Global Union, will now step up the campaign to ensure that freedom of association and collective bargaining be fully respected.

 

The detained trade unionists must be immediately released, the draconian claims on individual workers and their organisations have to be withdrawn. After this, the parties to the conflict can sit down and reach an agreement through normal negotiations. There is no other solution.

 

 

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

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