A leader of Seoul's subway workers, at a KCTU demonstration on 2nd February beside the Central Station explained why his members are in the "vanguard of the movement" as he puts it:

"Day shifts are ten hours; nights 14 with some of the most grueling shift patterns imaginable - two days, two nights, two days, one night, rotation day, holiday and back to the beginning again...

"In 1994 we led a struggle against the government's wage freeze and suffered police action worse than under the military.

"It is still illegal for us in the public sector to strike. Forty-six of the activists were arrested and 16 'did time'. Nearly 3000 were victimized in some way by management and over 100 were sacked. Leaders of the union staged a weeklong hunger strike at Myong Dong.

"Some of the (subway) lines are organized by the FKTU and that complicates our struggle. But we will not see our union crushed. We aim to stay in the front ranks."

In the "industrialized" world, only in Japan do women get paid a smaller proportion of men's income than in South Korea. There it is a mere 44%; in South Korea 52% on average. The old peasant attitude persists of regarding females as literally worth less than males. (This is the reason behind the practice continued to the present day of aborting fetuses 'diagnosed' as female - in the past by the village soothsayer, today by an electronic scan). They are discriminated against at school, at work and in society.

Gains previously fought for are being undermined, including one day a month menstruation leave. Creches are compulsory only at workplaces with more than 500 employees i.e. very few. Women face higher unemployment levels, almost minimal job security plus sexual harassment at work and even on the picket line. Apart from making undue super-profits for the rich, Korea's working women are expected to continue with all kinds of "traditional" domestic drudgery and suffer untold levels of domestic violence (against which no legal protection yet exists).

Though far fewer than in the '70s, tens of thousands still live a 'cat and mouse' existence in shacks they build for themselves on the outskirts of the cities. The bulldozers can move in at any moment to clear the way for 'developers'. On many occasions they have been accompanied by armed thugs and sometimes whole divisions of riot police to break up the mass protests of the dispossessed. Promises of new homes in the blocks that mushroom out of the wasteland are never fulfilled. A 'Korea Herald' editorial in January characterized the government's attempts to control speculation as like "applying insecticide after the locusts have already devoured the crops - the real estate agents and investors move with such agility."

Rents can take half a worker's wages. There is no such thing as the welfare state in South Korea. Much of children's schooling and a large proportion of medical care must be paid for. The cost of education for one child of secondary age is put at around 300,000 won per month. This is more than the statutory minimum wage and about the same amount as unemployment benefit which, is only available for ex-employees of large firms -1.6 % of the total.

Although the general level of unemployment is around 2%, one in ten 15-19 year-olds is unemployed (and without benefit) and 9% of 20-24 year-olds. A larger proportion of South Korea's young people go on to further education than in the US - 24% - but at the cost of great sacrifice made by their parents. A poor farmer will struggle for years to invest in a cow that he can sell for two million won the day his child gets accepted for university.

Medical insurance and health and safety provisions at work are totally inadequate. A number of doctors, dedicated to transform the situation, have played an important part in the workers' and democracy movement. One of them, Yang Kil-seung, indicated why:

"When you see the situation in the factories, it's just like what's described in the old books of Engels. You know it shouldn't be that way. You ask workers to join the union and make some kind of action together to change it... That's what we did in the 1980s. Our group's name was 'Action for Workers' Health and Safety'.

"We would report occupational disease cases and develop organizations amongst victims or people who had been injured in industrial accidents but not compensated or properly treated. There are plenty of them. They lose their fingers, hands, arms and legs.

"There are factory inspectors... about 300 in all of the country. So one guy has to look into more than 500 workplaces in a year. In this area, there are masses of small workshops. We often see bad cuts, lacerations, penetrations from the drilling machines and presses. 75% of press machines are operated illegally, so how can you punish them? It's 75%, not 5%! In big industries the situation is changing a bit - because of the unions - but without unions there is no protection.

"You only get 70% of the basic wage, which is less than half of the normal salary, for accidents and then only if the company doesn't wriggle out of it, cover it up. But if someone is off work ill they get either very little or nothing, depending on the size of the firm. They have to pay a large part of their treatment, even if they are covered by insurance. In small firms, there is no cover.

"I was called in to inspect the incidence of occupational disease in a large shipyard. The year before - the worst year - medical reports showed 20 victims. The very next year, when I was invited to check if the medical exam was done correctly or not, they reported 220. And then I added 65 more after reviewing the documents. They were nearly all pneumoconiosis and hearing loss problems. I think this year we can go even further - on organic solvent poisoning."

The day Yang Kil-seung recorded these comments he received a fax at his surgery asking about liver cancer occurring among people working with PVC (polyvinyl chloride).

"This is already well known in European countries and America but this seems to be the first found case in Korea. It's at a chemical plant in the Kunjan area in the South West, owned by Hang Hwa - a recently emerged Chaebol. 30 of the 60 workers have to boil the PVC materials in a tank and go inside it to clean it every time it is emptied. The government (which runs the workers' compensation insurance) has said they cannot pay for the cost of the medical treatment since the disease is not recognized. So they are being treated by the general health insurance, which they pay themselves. Such cases are only just coming to light in these 'developing' countries."

Another highly respected 'democratic' medical practitioner is Kim Rokho, taken to court for "interference with business" when he took his place each day on the picket line at Wonjin Rayon. Workers there had been stricken with a lethal industrial disease caused by carbon disulphide poisoning and were demanding compensation. Getting no response from the heartless management, they took the desperate step of keeping the coffin of one of their fellow sufferers with them at the gates of the factory for nearly 20 weeks. They were victorious in 1993 and the company was forced to close but the work of the campaigners continues as does the court case. This doctor is also known throughout the movement for the clinic/hospital he set up to help workers who cannot afford treatment and to care for victims of police torture.

But struggle is a way of life for the Korean working class and especially for its activists. The 1996-97 great strike, the first since the second half of the 1940s, may have taken the world by surprise, but it had been a long time in the making. The first truly 'general' strike, it had been preceded not only by a vigorous and lengthy campaign against the changes to the Labor law, but by decades of struggle to establish independent and fighting trade unions.

According to the KCTU's own account, when the independent 'Korea National Council of Trade Unions' was formed in November 1945, it "supported revolutionary socialists" and put forward the demand to the American military administration that "complete control be allowed by the workers' factory committees over enterprises formerly owned by the Japanese and pro-Japanese Koreans". It played an important role in the great September strike of 1946, followed by the March strike of 1947, and the one-day general strikes of February and May 1948.

The Korean Labor Federation for Independence, on the other hand, a forerunner of the FKTU was set up in 1946 with the aim not of liberating but of controlling the working class - a tool of the bosses. It loudly declared its total hostility to socialism and actively promoted co-operation between labor and management. In this it had the full backing of the government, the bosses and the American military up to and during the Korean war of 1950-53. Everything was done in this period to stem the tide of popular uprising and a take-over of society by the Korean working class.

Such was the force of the movement from below that this devastating war would never have been inflicted on the people of Korea if they had been left to decide their own fate. Bruce Cummings and Jon Halliday in their book Korea: The Unknown War maintain that without US intervention, there would have been a "revolutionary transformation of society". Large elements of workers' direct democracy had no doubt been established throughout the South, often before the Northern army arrived. Whether the "communists" of North Korea, the USSR or China would have succeeded in imposing their bureaucratic model is another question. But the intervention of US imperialism and, during the Korean War, soldiers from 16 other capitalist countries under the flag of the United Nations, caused the atrocious carnage that has left a legacy of hatred against imperialism.

During the Korean War, there were heroic strikes by textile workers, miners and dockworkers. The latter attempted to boycott the transport of military supplies. The struggle for free and democratic trade unions continued unabated throughout the long harsh years of the Syngman Rhee regime. In 1956, two million votes were given to a candidate standing for socialist democracy and a planned economy - Cho Pong-am. Two years later, Rhee had him executed for "collaboration with North Korea". Then, on the pretext of imminent invasion, he moved to push 22 bills through parliament including revision of the National Security law. He had all opposition parliamentarians removed from the Assembly by police trained in the martial arts. When in 1960 he was seen to use ballot rigging and sheer terror tactics to prevent the re-election of an opposition vice-president Chang Myon, students poured onto the streets in protest. The police turned on them with live ammunition, killing over 100. This only drove them to more protest action and brought others into the movement. When martial law was declared, the Korean army refused to fire on the students, many of whom demonstrated under the slogan "Democracy in Politics and Equality in the Economy".

The "April (students') Revolution" of 1960 gave enormous impetus to the struggle for fighting workplace organizations. In the ten months after Rhee was forced into exile there were around 2,000 street demonstrations involving a million people. Cho Pong-am's Progressive Party became the Socialist Mass Party and joined forces with student, trade union and other organizations to demand the establishment of ties with the North and elections to re-unify the country. Early in 1961, the students again took the lead and mobilized support for a conference of delegates from North and South. Just four days before it was due to take place, a group of army officers under Major General Park Chung-hee, with the blessing of Washington, carried through a coup d'état, and the labor movement was once again crushed.

The Korea Labor and Society Institute (KLSI) in a history of the trade union movement explains how, after being disbanded along with all political parties and socialist groups, the unions went through a process of "dissolution, reorganization and expansion" in the 1960s and 1970s. They were re-established from the top only by orders of the military in 1961 through its Union Reorganization Committee. The FKTU was the result and was paid for by the American CIA.

Thus formed, in the words of the KLSI, it "fell down completely" in its obligations to the working class of Korea. It openly collaborated with the repression carried out by Park and the military. It has never been forgiven. Bitter feelings towards what was known in the movement as this "yellow dog" union federation persist today and have been sustained by the 'lesser' crimes of the more recent period. In 1987, its leaders swore a loyalty oath to the military dictatorship. It regularly receives financial assistance from the government of Kim Young-sam (of up to $7 billion per annum). When South Korea was accepted into the OECD, it participated in a government delegation to the ILO, white-washing the state's use of the military against (KCTU) strikers.

The whole period of the 1960s, '70s and '80s was characterized by an unending round of struggle and repression - more struggle meant more repression, more repression meant more struggle. Compressed into three decades were processes which had developed over three centuries in the world's first industrialized nation - Britain. As in all countries in the early days of capitalism, industrialization was producing an ever-growing army of wage-slaves. Their cruel treatment at the hands of the factory-owners would push them into 'combining' together for protection. Every attempt would be persecuted, driven underground into 'secret societies' and labeled as 'conspiracies' against the state itself.

The first unions would have difficulty getting beyond the factory level before they were crushed. But the harshness of conditions would send workers again and again down the path of organizing until, at last, powerful regional and national bodies could be formed. As soon as the pace of industrialization quickened, the labor disputes multiplied. There were just 95 in 1959 and by the very next year, 227. In October of 1961, 100,000 workers were organized into trade unions. Ten years later, half a million and by 1979, the year of Park's assassination, more than one million.

The atrocity would never be forgotten or forgiven. In its aftermath, the military moved in a pre-emptive strike against the labor movement. The leaders of both trade union federations were removed by edict from their posts. Thousands of local union branches were dissolved and union officers sacked, arrested and sent to military-run "education camps". From then on no federations or industrial unions were permitted by law; only workplace or company unions were allowed and then only one on any site.

Once more, however, the workers of South Korea showed they would not be cowed. Within a matter of years - by 1984 - an economic slow-down had given way to a new upturn in the economy. There was a corresponding upturn in the workers' movement. New struggles arose - for wage increases, improvements in working conditions, the establishment of independent unions and for the democratization of the government/company unions. But, constantly harassed and persecuted by the state, it would still be more than ten years before the founding of the present-day KCTU.

The Korean workers have fought, been crushed, regrouped and fought again. They have demonstrated with particular courage and tenacity that iron law of capitalist society - that workers will not cease their struggle to throw off the yoke of capitalist exploitation. They have their pioneers and martyrs like the worker-hero Chun Tae-il and the women of Dong-il Textiles who fought long and hard against a ruthless employer, the forces of the state and the leaders of their own FKTU union. The movement will have its ebbs and flows. There will be defeats, pauses and victories all contributing to the emergence of powerful workers' organizations.

The students, too, had their pioneers and martyrs: Kim Sang-jin in the 1970s and Cho Sung-man, Park Jong-chol and Lee Han-yol in the 1980s - all of whom paid with their lives in a struggle to rid society of dictators and imperialist domination. Coming from the more privileged sections of society, students were nevertheless deeply affected by what they saw around them. That and their own experiences at the hands of the state machine convinced them of the ideas of class struggle and socialism. They would go to the countryside or into the workshops to share the life of the factory worker or the village laborer in the manner of the Narodniks in Russia at the end of the last century. They would agitate, educate, and organize and end up in jail. There, their understanding of Marxism was deepened. As so often happens, the prisons of the dictators become the universities of socialism.

Some of the most poignant and best-loved 'struggle songs' were written by the widely known composer Kim Ho-chul. He had first hand experience of how the regime treated its 'dissident elements' in the 1980s:

"We were constantly being arrested and kept for months without anyone being informed of where we were. And always the torture. It comes back to you. At night you remember.

"One time I was tied up like a chicken with leather belts and suspended from the ceiling. They would pour hot peppery sauce down your nose. You could only retch. You thought it would never stop and you would not survive...

"When you came out you looked for your friends. Some turned up, some have still not turned up and some will never turn up".

For weeks the whole nation seemed to be on the streets. There were battles and injuries, mass arrests and even another death at the hands of the 'Security' police, but the regime was now fighting for its life. In some instances young soldiers came over to the side of the movement, sick of the way they were treated in Chun's army. After 40 years of military rule, with hardly a moment's respite, it seemed as if a whole era was coming to an end.

Day after day, the students were on the demonstrations, often joined by workers and sometimes actually over-powering the hated riot police. The movement was essentially aimed at ending dictatorship and establishing the basic democratic rights that all bourgeois revolutions have inscribed on their banner - freedom of speech, assembly, press and organization. Not only were the days of the dictators numbered but the longer the battle continued, the more attractive became the idea of doing away with the very system they protected. It was clear that in the hot-house conditions of the Great Struggle the ideas of socialism were coming to the fore.

General Chun Doo-hwan was forced to accept standing down in favor of civilian rule. From the point of view of the bourgeois, democracy is anyway preferable and cheaper. Chun's successor, Roh Tae Woo - unlike the joint leaders of the opposition party, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae Jung - had no democratic 'credentials'. He had in fact been an accomplice of Chun Doo-hwan's in the bloody suppression of the "Kwangju Commune". Nevertheless, circumstances obliged him to come out with elaborate promises to change the old order - direct elections, freedom of the press, the release of all political prisoners, the restoration of civil liberties, an attack on corruption and the reform of education and local government. As before, faced with revolution, the ruling class preferred reform.

The enormous access of confidence is reflected in the figures. The number of company level unions increased by three times from 1987 to 1993 reaching a total of 7,147 with a membership of nearly two million. The number of organized workers rose in the first half of 1987 by 2.5% but by December was up by 49.6% and again in 1988 by 50.2%. The number of strikes rose from 276 in 1986 to 3,749 in 1987. In the two years after the Great Struggle they were at the level of 1,878 and 1,616. Nominal wages grew by 25% in 1989.

The success of the struggles on pay, hours, holidays etc, in the context of a still booming South Korean economy, helped forge a broader movement. Disregarding the strictures of the labor law, worker-militants formed regional, industrial and national trade union bodies. These developments were matched on the political plane with intense activity in the underground - much of it based on socialist teachings - and in attempts to overcome the numerous obstacles to standing candidates of the working class in elections and building a workers' party.

In the presidential elections of 1988 and again in 1992, a revered veteran of the Labor movement, Paek Ki-wan, stood as the candidate of a "Progressive Party". He was known as a socialist, but did not use the term in his campaigns for legal reasons. (After the collapse of the planned economies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, like many other activists in the movement, he questioned the viability of socialism). Perhaps as a reaction against dogmatism, Paek Ki-wan's party was a broad coalition of diverse elements that put forward a 100 point program. Politically limited, excluded from the media and generally hampered by the state, it failed to gather even the 3% of the popular vote needed by law to stay in existence after the elections and was dissolved.

In Assembly elections last year, the KCTU found ways of ensuring there were some independent candidates standing although they had no right by law to be involved in politics. They faced the very real obstacles of blatant official discrimination, lack of resources and outright fear on the part of the electorate of the consequences of voting 'left'. The 1996-97 strike has dispelled much of this fear and cut across the deeply ingrained regionalism that has bedeviled Korean politics. The new situation could give quite different results. But a great deal depends on program and on being seen as the best fighters and as those who have an answer for every problem confronted by workers at home as well as at the workplace.

The program of a workers' candidate should obviously take up the demands for an 8-hour working day, a living wage and jobs for all. It would link them to the need to take over the Chaebol and run industry and the banks according to the wishes of the population expressed through elected representatives at all levels. Elections in other countries show that candidates pledging to live on a workers' wage and to have all their expenses controlled by representatives of the movement are extremely popular. If they have led mass struggles and scored major victories, they stand an even better chance of getting a respectable vote. There is no point in standing candidates just for the sake of getting some individuals into parliament but the elections and the assembly debates themselves can provide a forum in which the voice of the worker can be heard.

After 1987, unionization had proceeded rapidly in previously unorganized sectors such as the press, hospitals, construction, research institutes, schools, business associations, servicing and retailing. The newly established unions in the giant factories of Daewoo, Hyundai, Kia etc. increased their strength by coming together on a company level. Rejecting the FKTU as a totally undemocratic and collaborationist federation, they formed their own regional councils and then a 'National Council' which reorganized to become the mainly blue-collar KTUC (Korean Trade Union Congress). Encouraged by the success of long-running strike battles at Hyundai, KBS and other workplaces, it flexed its muscles by calling national action of all its members.

In May of 1990, a federation of the (non-FKTU) white-collar unions was established - the KCIIF. Technicians, clerical and financial workers, college employees had set up their own independent federations. Industrial Councils were set up by printing workers, foreign company workers, building maintenance workers and university lecturers. A slightly earlier attempt in 1990 to set up a Solidarity Council of large enterprise trade unions had met with vicious government repression. In 1991 anger erupted at the death in prison of a trade union leader from Hanjin Heavy Industry and the killing by riot police of a student activist with two months of strikes and protests in May and June.

But one initiative stubbornly followed another to bring the white-collar and blue-collar federations together to build an organization to rival the yellow FKTU. In 1992, a year of struggle against the wage system, the KCIIF and the KTUC came together in a "Joint Committee for Ratification of ILO Basic Conventions and Labor Law Reform". In all of the five years that Roh Tae-woo had been in power, promise after promise on trade union, democratic and human rights had been broken. Even the direct elections conceded in the 1987 struggle failed to produce results which would change things radically in favor of Korea's working people.

The hopes of many were pinned on the election to the presidency in 1992 of one-time democracy movement leader Kim Young-sam. He even took a number of 'left-wingers' from the student movement into his administration. But, in spite of some popular moves against the most hated enemies of the workers, he would soon dash their hopes of any real improvement in their lives. Many of the old methods of holding them down would survive.

Under the new president, the army was, to some extent, purged. The secret police had their wings clipped a little. A number of Chaebol bosses were 'punished'. The founder of Hyundai, Chung Ju-young, was convicted of illegal spending on his attempt to beat Kim Young-sam in the 1992 election. Later, the founders of Samsung and Daewoo were amongst those put on trial and found guilty of corrupt dealings with the two previous heads of state - Chun Doo-hwan and Roe Tae-woo. The latter were also charged with treason for their part in the Kwangju massacre and put behind bars.

But, in general, the old 'rules of the game' still applied. A ruthless persecution of all opposition continued and hundreds of trade union and political prisoners remained in jail. Most importantly for the hundreds of thousands of workers joining the ranks of the emerging independent trade union federations, the labor laws remained firmly geared to 'single-unionism' and to maintaining, even intensifying, the unfettered rule of the Korean capitalist class.

With the economy already running into difficulties in 1995 and 1996, it was clear that the government, acting on behalf of the Chaebol and hiding behind arguments about 'Segyehwa' (globalization) and world competition, would move onto the offensive in an attempt to take back the newly won advances in wages and conditions. The familiar tune about workers putting the economy at risk and 'pricing themselves out of the market' was not well received. Even the FKTU or Hankook Nochong came under pressure from its members to organize resistance but, as the KLSI puts it, "continued with its Labor-management co-operative revisionism". It supported the ban on 'multi-unionism' which excluded the KCTU from any workplace where either the FKTU or the company already had a union organization and it did nothing to fight the prohibition of unions in the public sector. (It had also secretly signed wage accords with the employers in 1993 and 1994).

Nevertheless, the KCTU managed to build up a membership of over half a million, organizing in the 'newer' industries. It has a monopoly of all of the six Korean car-making firms for example and all of shipbuilding. The FKTU has traditionally organized in medium-sized firms. It claims well over one million members but its rivals say the real dues-paying membership is half that. The average membership of unions affiliated to the KCTU is 3,746 while the average for both federations is only 230. The rate of trade union membership - whether as a proportion of the total workforce of 20 million or of the 12 million employed workers - stands at no more than 14%. But this small 'active' can have a powerful effect; persecution creates formidable enemies.