Hawkish members of KCTU clash with dovish new group in competition for members


A brawl on Friday between members of two umbrella labor organizations revealed growing tension in the nation’s labor movement since the launch of a dovish group late last year.

According to the police, about 100 members of the hard-line Korea Confederation of Trade Unions clashed with some 20 of the new Korea Labor Union Confederation on Friday morning in front of a petrochemical plant in Ulsan.

The brawl started when the KLUC members ― the smallest of the three umbrella labor groups in Korea ― tried to promote its anti-KCTU and pragmatist platform to workers, police officials said.

Some 40 were injured and 17 were taken to hospital. None were seriously hurt, they said.

“It seems that an excessive competition for members between the two groups led to the violent clash,” said an official at the Ulsan Metropolitan Police Agency.

“We will investigate all those involved and will also try to determine whether the violence was premeditated,” he said.

Park Heung-sun, director of policy planning at the KLUC, said his organization would take legal steps against the KCTU members who used violence and obstructed its legitimate activity.

“We will deal sternly with the incident and hold those who used violence legally responsible,” he said.

The KCTU did not release an official statement about the incident. Its spokesperson could not be reached by phone Sunday.

Since its launch in November 2011, the KLUC has fast expanded membership in the city, a hotbed of organized labor in Korea, criticizing the KCTU for being overly political, confrontational and complacent.

A KLUC-affiliated industrial union for construction workers started there early in December with just 100 members and has now grown to over 1,400, Park said.

The KCTU’s Construction Plant Workers’ Union, which, before the entry of the KLUC unit, had a monopoly in the city, has now been reduced to some 2,500 members, according to the Labor Ministry’s branch office there.

The incident in Ulsan reveals growing antagonism among labor groups, after a law permitting plural unionism forced union monopolies to compete for members, observers said.

“Under a new labor environment, the country’s labor scene is changing after years being dominated by two groups ―- the KCTU and the Federation of Korea Trade Unions,” a labor ministry official said.

The FKTU is the oldest and largest of the three umbrella bodies, with 728,000 members, or 44.3 percent of the country’s total unionized workers.

The KCTU is the second largest, and the most militant, of the three with 580,000 members, or a 35.3 percent share.

The fledging KLUC is far smaller at just 40,000 members.

The KLUC criticizes the larger two for engaging in politicized activities, while representing better-off workers of large conglomerates. The FKTU and KCTU call the youngest group “government-friendly.”

The larger two have tried to isolate the KLUC for the past few months.

Last month, they boycotted a sitting of the Minimum Wage Committee in protest against the government’s decision to give the KLUC a seat.

“It is suspected that officials of Cheong Wa Dae and Labor Ministry were involved in the group’s formation. Aside from the questions over its independence, we doubt whether the KLUC has representativeness as a nationwide umbrella group,” the FKTU had claimed in a statement.

By Lee Sun-young (milaya@heraldcorp.com)