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SOUTH Korean workers walked out for a 24-hour general strike on Wednesday, demanding reform to the country’s restrictive labour laws and economic reform that ends the influence of big business.
Members of the Korean Metal Workers Union (KMWU) joined the strike calling for the guarantee of basic rights to join a trade union, to negotiate terms and conditions and take collective action.
Almost 130,000 KMWU workers across 109 workplaces joined the action as they demanded economic democracy and an end to the dominance of industrial companies known as chaebols over the country’s economy.
The biggest strike in global history is a template for our future. The silence tells you all you need to know, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
Labour’s watered-down legislation won’t protect us from unfair dismissal or ban some zero-hours contracts until 2027 — leaving millions of young people vulnerable to the populist right’s appeal, warns TUC young workers chair FRASER MCGUIRE
It is only trade union power at work that will materially improve the lot of working people as a class but without sector-wide collective bargaining and a right to take sympathetic strike action, we are hamstrung in the fight to tilt back the balance of power, argues ADRIAN WEIR
‘People up and down the country are asking whose side is the Labour government on and coming up with the answer: not workers,’ Unite general secretary Sharon Graham says