Neo-Liberal Methods of Labour Repression: Privatised Violence and Dispossessive Litigation in Korea

ABSTRACT

This article begins by asking what lies behind the rise of extreme methods of labour repression in Korea in the 2000s. The answer goes beyond the common neo-liberal conditions of intensified competition, insecurity and precariousness in the labour market. This study focuses on how market logic, emboldened by neo-liberal restructuring, guides the state and corporations to reconfigure methods of disempowering organised labour. The examination of Korea shows the government and employers have actively used newly emergent commercial security firms and public labour attorney offices to exercise private violence and file damage compensation lawsuits against unions and workers who resist neo-liberal employment conditions. The systematic deployment of commercial violence and dispossessive litigation to constrain workers’ mobilisation deepens our understanding of the complexity of state and corporate coercion in the neo-liberal era. The state–capital relation in these circumstances also raises questions about the authority of legal institutions under democratic governments encroached by heightened power of corporate interests.

KEYWORDS:

• neo-liberalism
• labour movements
• private violence
• litigation
• South Korea

Notes

1. This study understands neo-liberal expansion to embody both deregulation – emphasis on market competition and withdrawal of state regulation – and re-regulation – restructuring of regulatory measures.

2. The sites with protracted protests are called jangki nongseongjang and there were at least 13 in Seoul alone as of 2016 (Kyunghyang Shinmun, October 5, 2016). The protest repertoires include one-person protest, three-steps-one-bow protest, hunger strike, hair shaving and sky protest.

3. This study uses private, privatised, commercial and commodified violence to denote violence exercised by commercial security (guarding) agents, companies and contractors that often operate with public labour attorney firms (labour consultation business or industrial relations specialists). Security refers to non-combat measures of assuring personal safety such as guarding, not state measures of safeguarding national territory and population like in the meaning of “national security.”

4. Many studies anchor their starting point on Weber’s famous stipulation on “the state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” (Weber 2007, 221). While the state is deemed to be the sole agent to legitimately use violence, it has rarely monopolised violence and the interpretation of legitimate use of force has not been unilateral. Violence has concurrently been exercised by private actors in an aggressive manner by militias, mercenaries and gangsters or in a passive way by volunteer vigilance patrols and private guards at sub-national levels.

5. This is perhaps a bias created by US-centred scholarship in the field of international relations, security studies and criminology.

6. Given that President Park is the daughter of a former military dictator, it is not surprising that her administration relied on unlawful measures to silence political dissent while seeking collusive exchanges with the chaebol. On these grounds, Park was impeached in March 2017.

7. There is an ongoing investigation on Yang Seung-tae, former Supreme Court Chief Justice (2011–2017) who drafted over 400 documents to influence court rulings. The documents include cases of the dismissal of Korail workers, the legality of a national teachers’ union and the reform of the wage structure. The Supreme Court overturned the rulings made by lower courts in these cases and consequently upheld the interests of corporations (Hankyoreh 21, August 28, 2017).

8. Labour parties have since lost considerable political relevance. The DLP was torn apart by factional strife and today it is survived by two small splinter parties, the Justice Party (with six elected seats) and Minjung Party (with one elected seat) in the National Assembly.

9. Labour’s democratic citizenship is understood as labour being recognised as a legitimate collective actor in its relation to employers and the state and the basic rights to exercise labour’s legitimate standing in society are guaranteed by legal stipulations.

10. One of the most notorious cases was the so-called butcher knife incident that occurred at the Hyundai Automobile Union in 1989. But kusadae is different from private security firms in the sense that it was formed primarily by company “insiders” such as managerial employees and other pro-management workers.

11. These public attorneys have to pass a national certification exam by demonstrating professional knowledge of labour laws.

12. Agents are paid $180–270 per day (Policy Report 2012).

13. The document “Proposals to stabilise industrial relations to raise the firm’s competitiveness” was prepared in April 2011 (Hankyoreh 21, October 8, 2012). National legislator, Sang-jeong Shim, revealed that Samsung distributed a document entitled “S Group’s 2012 labour management strategies,” which contained similar content on destroying unions.

14. When corporations make compensation lawsuits against unionists, they will often include defamation of corporations and CEOs to increase the amount of damage made by labour unions (Sonjapko 2017).