[Editorial] Businesses and police: partners in keeping labor unions down?

It has been revealed that an internal police report on the activities of the Pohang construction workers’ union was handed over to company officials. The document in question covers a rally held the day before the union took over company offices. The police say there "shouldn’t be any problem because it was just a simple description of the situation at the rally," but that looks like a lame excuse when you consider that the document says it is supposed to be destroyed after being read. It is only natural that people are asking whether the police and POSCO are in bed together.

The suspicions grow deeper if you look at a POSCO document on ways to deal with changes to the labor-company relationship. It has a chart describing executives’ activities, in which the Ministry of Labor, the Labor Commission, the police, the prosecution, and Pohang’s city hall are listed as "related government offices" with the directive to hold with them "unscheduled informal gatherings" and maintain friendships. It also explains that executives are to strive to maintain relations with the "related agencies" to stay ahead of any new unions filing for registration and potential disputes, and to regularly attend events organized by the top local government labor official.

The control maintained on employees came close to being surveillance. The POSCO document classifies certain employees by how "friendly" they are to the company and outlines a program for having officials observe each of them. The document also goes over "proper" lines of communication for reporting and collecting information on the daily activities of workers on the job. Put simply, the company was trying to control every action of its workers.

POSCO never had labor-company disputes in the past, so the fact that it was overreacting fundamentally has to be because of a perverted view of unions. Thinking that says unions are dangerous and that the slightest disputes have to be thwarted before they happen leads to excessive reactions.

The problem is not unique to POSCO. More than a few companies still have their heads buried in a bygone era. There are even companies that have rules under which officials responsible for union relations can be fired if they commit "three strikes" when it comes to keeping unions in line. Public security agencies like the police are not much different. Cooperation between the companies and government agencies for the sake of "stable labor-company relations" originates in this kind of thinking.

The goal of having labor-management relations develop to a level found in the advanced nations of the world will remain a distant goal as long as business and government see unions as an object of control and surveillance. The government must thoroughly investigate the relationship between POSCO and the police and sternly punish those responsible for impropriety. This needs to be used as an opportunity to make it known that companies and civil servants who regularly engage in illegal or less-than-legal activities for believing decades-old views about how to handle unions have to pay a price. Otherwise, the country is going to see repeat episodes of the same kind of behavior in the future.