Only 22 of 644 worksites in actual bargaining with parent firms, KCTU says

Of 644 worksites affiliated with the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) that have demanded direct bargaining with their parent companies, only 22 are actually engaged in negotiations, the union said Tuesday. Seven months after the revised Trade Union Act took effect, the bargaining rate stood at just 3.4 percent.

The KCTU held a press conference at 11 a.m. Tuesday in front of Cheong Wa Dae Sarangchae in Seoul, saying the government's enforcement decrees and interpretive guidelines under the Trade Union Act were giving parent companies grounds to avoid bargaining, and urging that the relevant decrees and guidelines be scrapped.

The KCTU called the situation "the seven-month report card of the revised Trade Union Act" — shipbuilding subcontract workers in the Geoje, Tongyeong and Goseong areas, who had staged high-altitude sit-in protests to push for revision of the Trade Union Act, were once again resorting to such protests to demand direct bargaining with parent companies.

KCTU Chairman Yang Kyung-soo, citing the sit-in by Hanwha Ocean shipbuilding subcontract workers, said the enforcement decrees and interpretive guidelines "have created loopholes for employers who refuse to come to the bargaining table." He went on to say that "fewer than 30 out of more than 600 bargaining targets are actually engaged in negotiations," and called for the decrees to be scrapped and the guidelines withdrawn.

At the press conference, cases were presented in which parent companies had been recognized as employers yet bargaining still took a long time to begin, or disputes arose again over the scope of bargaining agenda items.

Kim Gwang-chang, chairman of the Service Workers' Federation, said that in the case of CJ Logistics, it took six months to begin bargaining even after a court ruling recognized the parent company's employer status. He said workers at Nonghyup Distribution had won at the regional labor relations commission but were told by the National Labor Relations Commission that wage issues were not subject to direct bargaining with the parent company.

Kim also cited a case in which the SK Intecs branch had completed an initial labor-management meeting but the parent company subsequently denied its employer status and refused to bargain, saying this illustrated the problems with the enforcement decrees and interpretive guidelines.

The Ministry of Employment and Labor's administrative guidelines on the scope of labor disputes, announced Sept. 3, also drew criticism. The KCTU said the government had used administrative guidelines to narrow the scope of industrial action that the revised Trade Union Act had expanded.

Choi Hee-sun, chairwoman of the Korean Health and Medical Workers' Union, said excluding performance bonuses tied to corporate profits from the scope of bargaining and industrial action violated workers' labor rights, and called on the government to "immediately scrap the guidelines and apologize."

Choi Ra-hyeon, chairwoman of the National Democratic United Workers' Union under the Democratic General Federation, said "the government is blocking direct bargaining with parent companies through its decrees and guidelines," and pointed to the practice of setting wages for non-regular workers in the public sector through administrative guidelines rather than bargaining. She urged the government to come to the bargaining table in its capacity as an employer.

The KCTU called for parent companies to immediately respond to bargaining demands, the scrapping of the Trade Union Act's enforcement decrees and interpretive guidelines, the abolition of the administrative guidelines on the scope of labor disputes, and the government to fulfill its responsibility to ensure the revised Trade Union Act takes practical effect.