Updates for June 16th   2008-06-16 11:21

South Korea is in a very bad shape this week. Not only has the government failed to provide any answer to what millions of protesters have been demanding for 8 weeks now, but also the nation's trade and shipping infrastructure has been totally paralyzed by the massive strike of the Cargo Transport Workers' Union. The strike is already estimated to have cost $1.6 billion to the economy, and as more truck drivers participate in the strike, the impact is only expected to snowball. See below for more news on the strike.

Candlelight vigils continue as usual, though the number of participants is now much lower than last week when up to 1,000,000 protesters filled the streets. A few thousand People gathered in Seoul Plaza and a few other locations, and there was no clash with the police. Obviously, since a lot of us are ordinary citizens rather than professional activists, we have our own jobs to do and families to take care of. University and high school students are also feeling the burden of final exams, scheduled for mid-June in many universities and late June to early July in most high schools. But this drop in the number of protesters is no indication of the things to come. Something so closely related to our daily life, such as food safety, consumer prices, and universal health care, cannot be simply put aside after a while. As we emphasized numerous times, President Lee Myung-Bak would be making a big mistake if he thought that our protests would fizzle out in a while. Exams will be over and schools will break for summer. A lot of Seoulites who don't have air conditioners will also be looking for a grassy place to wear out the warm July evenings. These folks usually go to riverside parks (Gosubuji), but why not Seoul Plaza or Yeouido? There's always been an air of festivity in our candlelight vigils/protests. Few of us ever thought that political participation could be fun, but many are finding that it actually is. Unless 2MB has a damn good answer up his sleeve, he'd better look forward to a very troubling summer.

It was revealed earlier today that Hannara Party's report in May about the safety of U.S. beef had been seriously flawed. The ruling party had sent a team of investigators to an American cattle ranch, with the goal of assuring the public that U.S. beef posed no risk of mad-cow disease (BSE). In the report it released to the public, Hannara Party conveniently omitted several things they thought the public wouldn't want to hear: for instance, the fact that they couldn't confirm that Special Risk Materials (brain, spinal cord, and certain other internal organs) were properly being disposed of. We will report more on this as the issue unfolds; our first impression, however, is that the President's gang has tried to deceive the People -- once again.

Back to the Cargo Union's strike. Rather than repeating what everyone else is talking about, we'd like to refer you to The Hankyoreh's English Edition for the latest numbers and other relevant stuff. Just to give a brief summary, the Cargo Union's most important demand is for collective bargaining rights. Wait, doesn't every labor union already have that right? But the story is a little more complicated here. Most members of the Cargo Union are nothing more than "a man with a truck". As such, they are considered by the government to be self-employed. In addition, the shipping industry in Korea consists of thousands of very small companies. There are a few large companies, but they are not part of the story. So in the government's eyes, there isn't a particular corporation of which members of the Cargo Union are employees; hence the Cargo Union doesn't have the rights that typical labor unions enjoy. What this means is that the individual truckers have virtually no control over their pay (i.e. the fees they charge). If one trucker demands a higher fee, the company will just hire another. Competition is murderously fierce, as everyone must outbid everyone else. Trucking fees, as a result, have remained ridiculously low compared to the cost of owning and operating a truck. Whereas the price of diesel fuel increased by 1,000% in last decade or so, trucking fees increased only by 50% during the same time.

In an interview we read elsewhere, an old truck driver said that he gets paid $680 for transporting a standard container box from Busan to Incheon (approx. 300 miles), but he has to spend over $550 for fuel and toll. Add maintenance and other fixed costs, and you get the picture. This man was not even a member of the Cargo Union, but he was refusing to transport anything because he wouldn't make any money anyway. All because the government refuses to recognize the Cargo Union's collective bargaining rights -- something that should be one of the most fundamental rights of any labor union. As the news article linked above says, this year's strike is not about oil prices; it's about the system as a whole, and the way in which the government treats relatively powerless groups within its jurisdiction.

Regardless of what you think about labor unions, what this tells us is that the one and only reason most People voted for Lee Myung-Bak in last year's election -- the ECONOMY -- no longer exists. We didn't vote for him because we liked his ideology. We didn't vote for him because of his religion. We didn't vote for him because we thought that he wasn't guilty of the dozens of criminal charges that were laid against him. We voted for him because he was the only candidate who said he could make life better for ordinary citizens (seomin). That's not controversial at all; ask any informed Korean and they'll tell you just that. Now, it's been four months since Lee was sworn into his new office. What happened? The Korean Won is the only major currency in the world that has been consistently falling against the already weak U.S. dollar for the last four months. Oil and consumer prices adjusted for per capita GDP have become higher than in most other industrialized nations. When tens of thousands of self-employed people actually lose more money the longer they stay in business, and when this phenomenon can be directly attributed to a number of policies that have been implemented since Lee became President, we cannot but suspect that Lee is totally incapable of delivering what he promised. Why, then, is he still President?

The video we linked to in yesterday's post offers valuable insights into what Lee Myung-Bak thinks it means to make the economy better. If you haven't already seen it, we urge you to take 25 minutes to see it now. If anyone is going to benefit from Lee's policies, it is the large construction companies with which Lee has been affiliated for a long time. Enough said.

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