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Writer's pictureSteve Nuzum

Labor Unions: A Democratic Check in Times of Crisis

BY STEVE NUZUM


South Korea has been experiencing a major political crisis which, among other things, highlights the way strong labor organizations can play a role in preserving democratic institutions. 


The country, which ended its last period of military rule in 1987, was roiled by protests after president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in the country, in what some have called an attempted coup. As of this writing, he is facing his second impeachment attempt since declaring martial law. 


According to piece by Kap Seoul in the pro-labor Jacobin, Yoon used military forces to forcefully invade the hall of the National Assembly, South Korea’s legislature, by dropping from helicopters and smashing in windows, with the goal of arresting legislators. This episode has been an uncomfortable echo of not only South Korea’s history of military coups, but of the January 6 insurrection in the US.  


According to reporting by the New York Times, Yoon is a rightwing candidate who perhaps owes both his extremely narrow victory in the election, and his unpopularity, to his use of divisive culture war issues (for example, moving to limit protections for LGBTQ+ South Koreans). His political opponents said by declaring martial law, Yoon, whose party experienced large losses in the recent election, was aiming to make South Korea a “dictatorship”; in turn, he said they were plotting an “insurgency” by bringing impeachment.  Some feel Yoon only won as a reflection of disapproval with the liberal party. 


One noteworthy element of the drama is the involvement of the largest South Korean labor union. 


According to the Times, “A trade union with more than a million members declared an ‘indefinite general strike’ and said it would gather in downtown Seoul early Wednesday to demand Mr. Yoon’s resignation.” (martial law was canceled). The union, South Korea’s largest coalition of labor organizations, is now engaging in what it calls an indefinite general strike until Yoon resigns. (While Yoon has survived at least one impeachment vote, the leader of his own party has said he will eventually step down.) 


E. Tammy Kim, writing in The New Yorker, explains that,“The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions [is] the successor to the industrial-labor activists who helped power the democracy movement of the nineteen-eighties”. 


The National Assembly quickly and successfully moved to end martial law, with even the head of Yoon’s own party quickly rejecting Yoon’s actions, and it’s not clear how much impact the threat of a general strike had, but it’s also hard to imagine similar labor union actions in many parts of the United States.


Well-functioning labor organizations can provide democratic checks and balances in an open society. 


In many parts of America, and particularly in states like South Carolina-- which has been called the most anti-labor state in the country, and which has the United States’ lowest rate of labor union membership-- those in power have often aggressively painted labor organizations as the enemy of a free society. 


Unions, of course, are organizations of imperfect people. But the same can be said for government bodies and political organizations. And in South Carolina, where one party has exercised increasing control over all three branches of government for two decades, there are inherently fewer checks within the government system.  


Labor organizations can and should provide one of those checks, but that requires their members to engage in democratic, collective decision-making, and to push their organizations to stand up and fight for those shared values.  


It is not an accident of history that radical anti-union sentiment and anti-Civil Rights sentiment have often gone hand in hand.  


1960s Civil Rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were outspoken proponents of responsible organized labor actions.  When a gunman killed King in 1968, he was in Tennessee to support striking sanitation workers


During his final speech, King was explicit in supporting the right of public employees to engage in collective action, saying, “The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them…” 


As a South Carolinian, I find King’s words especially striking because our own state has, through its laws and court decisions, classified public employees as the single group not protected by the only truly positive element of our “Right to Work” law: the clause which prohibits employers from interfering in each employee’s right to join a labor association. The 2000 Branch v Myrtle Beach state Supreme Court decision interpreted South Carolina’s “Right to Work” law in such a way that public sector unions and union affiliates in the state, have lost an incredible amount of power and leverage (essentially, the Court found that the one protection for workers in the law— they can’t be prohibited from joining a union— does not apply to public sector employees in the state, because public employers are not included in the law’s description of “any employer”).


Part of the reason some politicians find it so attractive to attack “DEI” or “CRT” (meaning, in this context, a recognition of and attempt to address historic and ongoing systemic racism) is that in burying that history and reality, we bury the support that many of our most beloved historical figures showed for a strong, organized, and ethical labor movement. (In South Carolina, it was a merger of the state’s Black teacher’s association, the Palmetto Education Association, with the previously-segregated state teacher union affiliate which created The SCEA, a merger that was possible in part because the National Education Association union had by the 1960s adopted Civil Rights as a formal platform.) 


Despite this history, and arguably starting with President Reagan crushing the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association strike in 1981, anti-labor advocates have found huge success in painting labor unions, with a broad brush, as selfish and undemocratic. They have had particular success in recent years in persuading large numbers of people that teacher unions and organizations are greedy and intent not only on pitting the interests of teachers and families against each other, but on “indoctrinating” young people with vaguely-defined dangerous ideas.


This, too, is an echo of the anti-segregation 1960s, when intellectuals, college students, and other so-called “radicals” became the scapegoat of politicians like Richard Nixon, where the Southern Strategy-- as one of its major architects, Lee Atwater, would later explicitly admit-- traded overt racism against African Americans for subtler, coded (and yet still pro-segregation) messaging. 


Recent elections, nationally and in South Carolina, have chosen a large number of stridently anti-union figures. That many of these figures have also embraced more and more explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-diversity language is, again, probably no coincidence. 


It would seem that one obvious way to respond to this increasingly reactionary and exclusionary movement in government and in civic life, is by embracing a strong, democratic, and ethical labor movement. If a labor movement in South Korea is strong enough to help face down military rule, surely there are labor movements in the United States, and in South Carolina, strong enough to pick up the torch of previous movements for civil rights, and worker’s rights, and student rights-- which are, despite what anti-labor advocates would have us believe-- frequently the same rights.


Partisanship, in this struggle, is a distraction. Believing that the workplace should benefit both employers and employees, or that students deserve strong advocates willing to march and rally and strike for them if necessary, or that democratic institutions must be defended, should not be partisan issues. People with various party affiliations-- or with no party affiliations-- should be able to agree on these things, to support justice and equal protections for all people, and should, if necessary, engage in effective methods of peaceful direct action to achieve these things.


Because whatever progress we have made is not only always in need of protection, but it would not have been possible in the first place without organized direct action.

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