Posted on : Dec.12,2005 03:37 KST Modified on : Dec.12,2005 03:37 KST

The government has invoked emergency arbitration in the Korean Air pilots' strike, four days after it began. It is the fourth time the Korean government has ever done that, the second time this year. One worries about how the repeated interventions are going to harm relations between labor and the government and labor and business. The distrust will grow, and it is going to be more difficult to pass more modern legislation on labor-business relations.

What is most concerning is that more companies will come to expect government intervention. Korean Air's management has been unwilling to give an inch in the course of the negotiations. You can only conclude that it expected the government to intervene as it did in the Asiana pilots' strike last summer. Ordering the end to a strike is like treatment with poison and it restricts basic labor rights. The overuse of dramatic effects leads to ruin, and could lead to a vicious cycle where workers and companies are not left to work things out themselves and where government intervention becomes more common.

The effects of flight cancellations in the Korean Air strike were of course much more serious than the Asiana strike, and the general public is not very sympathetic when they see well-paid pilots go on strike over wages. Still, the government should have been more patient and thought about labor-business relations over the long run.

The overall trend makes you take another look at the Participatory Government's labor policies. It has a serious lack of an ability to mediate. If the effects of the strike were so serious that it needed to intervene four days after it began, it should have stepped in to mediate before it started. It didn't even try, and the problem is largely because of policies that are too partial towards resolving unemployment and creating jobs, mutual distrust between labor and the government because of the government's hard-line responses, and the subsequent lack of dialogue between labor and the government. If it does not want to keep blocking with a shovel that which can be blocked with a hoe, the government needs to work with a whole new attitude to restore relations.


The Hankyoreh, 12 December 2005.

[Translations by Seoul Selection]

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