Instances of corruption have been uncovered in the dockworkers’ unions of Busan and Incheon. Incheon prosecutors have booked four individuals, including past and present heads of the unions’ organization departments, for accepting bribes during the promotion and hiring process from employees and applicants. Ahead of this, prosecutors in Busan investigating the dockworkers’ union there have arrested the head of the union's standing committee and placed travel bans on eight others. The dockworker union investigations are not limited to Busan and Incheon, but are expanding to other ports nationwide like Pyeongtaek and Pohang.
That the corruption that had been intermittently going on for quite a long time was finally revealed, even belatedly, is welcome. The union, which was born the Federation of Korean Trade Unions Busan Dock Workers’ Union in 1947, has wielded strong influence for over 50 years as a “closed shop,” meaning that only union members could work the docks. Without fixed employers in the ports, the union enjoyed a peculiar structure in which its power was great. Yet as time passed, the union’s executive body had to be democratically controlled from below, but the head of the union’s standing committee was chosen through indirect elections. In the end, it has run into a situation with over a half-century of corruption coming to light through the prosecutors’ investigations. The moves, focused mainly around young laborers, within the dockworkers’ union to build a democratic union are noteworthy. Now is the time to fundamentally review the union’s organizational system, which denied its corruption to the end even after it was revealed.
The Uri Party is using the corruption scandal to push a plan to recover the right to supply labor at the nations ports. As the union did not use its control over labor supply transparently, but rather used it for personal profit, the fact is that there is little reason to oppose this plan. No less necessary than government control over labor supply is to find a transparent method for labor unions and civic groups to employ authority over labor supply. Just as we begin a structural operation on the union, we need to prepare the best system possible that allows both employers and laborers to really feel improvements. Of course, in the process of doing so, the dockworkers union needs to be reborn as a democratic union.
The Hankyoreh, 19 March 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (MRT)]
[Editorial] Dockworkers Union Must be Reborn as Democratic Union |
