Seoul, South Korea – For the previous six years, Kim Joo-hwan has labored as what in South Korea is named a “substitute driver”.
He drives individuals house of their automobile after they can not themselves as a result of they’ve been consuming.
Utilizing Kakao Mobility, a department of one in all South Korea’s largest tech firms, prospects can request a sober driver to fulfill them and safely take them and their automobile house, saving on the price of parking in a single day and the trouble of getting to retrieve their automobile the following day.
Like a rising variety of gig employees that depend on platform-based companies corresponding to Kakao, Kim has been concerned in organising higher working circumstances and pay.
Final 12 months, he helped set up a union to barter with Kakao administration for higher circumstances, corresponding to drivers being paid for the time they spend going to fulfill a consumer.
However now Kim feels he’s watching his authorities, led by conservative President Yoon Seok-yeol, resort to an previous tactic he remembers from his days as a younger employee within the Eighties: tarring unionists as communists engaged on behalf of North Korea.
This month, South Korea’s spy company raided the places of work of the Korean Confederation of Commerce Unions (KCTU), a number one left-wing umbrella group that represents employees throughout a number of industries, on allegations that union officers had unlawful contact with North Korean brokers.
Native media have reported that the Nationwide Intelligence Service (NIS) suspects that a variety of KTCU officers met with North Korean spies in China, Cambodia and Vietnam.
The KCTU condemned the raids as an effort to suppress the labour motion, promising to “battle towards the violence of the Yoon Suk-yeol regime”.
“This present authorities is searching for to divide employees, to increase the variations between completely different sorts of employees,” Kim advised Al Jazeera.
“They know that if employees come collectively, they’ll trigger massive losses for firms,” he added.
Below South Korean regulation, residents are prohibited from contact with North Korean individuals or organisations until they obtain authorities permission.
The nation’s controversial Nationwide Safety Regulation bans a spread of actions, together with expressions of sympathy with or help for North Korea, which fought a bloody struggle with South Korea from 1950 to 1953. The battle resulted in a stalemate that is still unresolved to today.
Critics have lengthy argued that the regulation is vaguely worded and could be simply misused by South Korean prosecutors and intelligence brokers to muzzle left-wing critics.
The army strongmen Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, who dominated South Korea through the speedy industrialisation of the Seventies and Eighties, routinely cited the menace from North Korea as a pretext to droop civil and political rights.
Extra just lately, conservative presidents, together with Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, who dominated from 2008 to 2017, employed related rhetoric to curtail speech and activism deemed pro-North Korean.
Yoon, a former chief prosecutor who had no political expertise earlier than getting into workplace final Might, has accused the labour motion of being a hotbed of corruption, singling out unions as one in all three sources of “evil” holding again the nation’s improvement.
To employees like Kim, the latest raids by the NIS, whose director is appointed by the president, really feel like the most recent iteration of a well-worn tactic.
“Even when there have been particular person members who truly had contact or relationships with the North Korean authorities, treating your entire union as an espionage organisation needs to be prevented,” Park Kyung-sin, a regulation professor at Korea College, advised Al Jazeera.
“To this point, some right-wing politicians are doing that and I hope that it doesn’t truly have an effect on the work of the Yoon administration,” Park stated.
South Korea’s labour motion has lengthy been recognized for the distinctly left-wing tenor of its activism.
Giant organisations such because the KCTU and the Korea Steel Employees’ Union typically maintain rallies espousing usually left-wing causes, together with opposition to joint army workouts by South Korea and the USA, which fought towards North Korea within the Korean Conflict.
The unions object to the workouts on the grounds they serve solely to antagonise North Korea and might enhance the chance of a struggle breaking out on the Korean Peninsula, whereas arguing that South Korea ought to as an alternative be searching for dialogue with Pyongyang.
In 2012, the KCTU voted to finish its affiliation with the Unified Progressive Social gathering (UPP), a minor left-wing get together, amid controversy over the pro-North Korea views of a few of its members.
Critics of the KCTU argue that, as a union, it ought to concern itself solely with office issues, corresponding to wage negotiations and advocating for employees who’ve grievances with their employers.
South Korea’s pro-business media have additionally known as union members egocentric for finishing up collective actions over the previous 12 months, at a time when the nation has been struggling to reboot a sluggish financial system after the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“At a time of financial disaster, as an alternative of sharing hardship, unions are finishing up an excessive battle to fulfil members’ calls for,” the right-leaning Donga Ilbo newspaper stated in a latest editorial.
Unions have argued that the Yoon administration is trying to scapegoat them and draw consideration away from its personal errors. The KCTU identified that the raids on its places of work got here shortly after Yoon had induced controversy whereas on a go to to the United Arab Emirates.
Throughout a gathering with South Korean troopers stationed within the nation, Yoon stated the UAE has an “enemy” in Iran, which is analogous to South Korea’s antagonistic relationship with North Korea. Iran accused Yoon of interfering in Iran-UAE relations and summoned the South Korean ambassador in Tehran to protest Yoon’s off-the-cuff remark.
It was not Yoon’s first flub whereas on an official journey abroad. Whereas in New York final 12 months, Yoon was caught on digital camera showing to make use of foul language to confer with US politicians after he had a short encounter with President Joe Biden.
The South Korean presidential workplace denied that Yoon had used any profane language, claiming {that a} native broadcaster misreported his phrases.
Kim, the gig employee, is now working to organise employees to foyer politicians for modifications within the nation’s labour regulation that might require firms to recognise contract employees as staff, and forestall firms from holding employees legally answerable for losses incurred throughout strikes.
“Myself and different platform employees are saying that we will’t stay beneath this method anymore,” Kim stated. “Now we have no selection however to battle for one thing higher.”