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The government on Sunday invoked its emergency arbitration power in a strike by pilots at Korean Air, ending it four days after it started, but both the company and trade union as well as the national economy had sustained enormous losses.
The strike exposes the flaw in Korea's labor movement. Korean Air has two unions: one consisting of ground-crew, flight attendants and other jobs, and one for pilots. The annual pay for the first union¡¯s 10,000 members averages about W43 million (US$43,000). The average annual pay of 1,340-plus unionized pilots stands at W100 million. Needless to say, benefits for pilots are also much better than for everyone else.
The general union accepted a wage freeze in June. "Seeing international oil prices spiral to US$60 per barrel, we couldn¡¯t demand an unreasonable wage increase," said union chairman Lee Dae-gyu. Instead, the union made concessions on a path of mutual survival with management. Management responded by paying a 50 percent bonus at the end of the year to encourage union cooperation.
The trouble is that our union movement is led not by bodies like the Korean Air general union but by organizations like its pilots union. And that means the union movement is faced with three crises. The first is a crisis of representation. Korea's union organization rate is 10.6 percent: one in 10 workers. It peaked at 19.8 percent in 1989 and fell to 13.8 percent in 1995 and 12 percent in 2000. Of 15.1 million wage earners, unionized workers number no more than 1.54 million.
Among the 5.48 million irregular workers, only 1 percent are members of a union, yet the proportion of unionized workers in big corporations with 500 workers or more is as high as 71.2 percent. Overall, Korean unions are organizations of regular workers in major businesses. That structure makes it impossible for trade unions to represent the interests of all workers.
The second crisis is one of legitimacy. Until the mid-1990s, the fruits of the unions' struggles for improved wages and working conditions still benefited workers in medium and small-sized companies and unorganized laborers because wages in smaller firms rose following a wage hike in big corporations. The reverse is true now. In 2002, the hourly wage of irregular workers was 80.5 percent that of regular workers. The rate fell to 70.5 percent this year, because the burden of pay increases for regular and unionized workers in big businesses is shifted to smaller companies and irregular workers.
Asked if they think it is right to fire irregular workers first when a payroll cut is needed, more than 60 percent of the union members polled at a major conglomerate this year replied yes. They see irregular workers as something like a safety valve for their job security. Thus the unions are moving away from the noble cause of protecting and forming solidarity among the socially weak. They are losing their legitimacy.
The final crisis is one of identity. Being unable to find a model befitting the market economy, our union movement still hangs on to the hackneyed phraseology of the class struggle. Labor circles are so closed that violence is the only answer whenever social dialogue is mentioned. Of course, struggles including strikes are the right, and even the raison d'etre, of trade unions. But if struggle is all they do, without dialogue, without compromise, then the unions will succumb to the chill wind of the times and die out.
Korea's unions are no longer the socially weak. They wield tremendous political, economic and social power, to the point where their influence has become excessive. Their ethical and moral collapse is a natural outcome of a structure consisting of a small number of rich unions. But it is the nature of things that organizations with power in excess of their capabilities and taking more than they give will eventually pay the price and collapse. The Korean union movement¡¯s clock is ticking.
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