Kaesong: Union Yes!

“Pots for Peace”: not another cannabinoid conflict resolution initiative from Marin County, but another Kim Tae Kyung OhMyNews pipe dream, to be sure.

TK, who loves everything from North Korea except defectors, has gone all erotic and stickied himself up over the North Korean-made cookware the ajummas are buying up at the high-end department stores in Seoul (there are reportedly still some export control complications with Kaesong’s plans for a penicillin factory, a pesticide plant, and a large aluminum tube mill). To hear TK tell it, this time next year there will be a Lotte World and a Kyobo Bookstore in the Koyro Hotel, and maybe even a room salon in the basement for good measure. I’ve already explained elsewhere why I’m a skeptic, for those of you who took seriously the idea that a hermetically sealed corporate labor camp surrounded by armed guards will seduce all of North Korea into a state of playful, perky consumerism. The hermetic sealing thing sort of begs a question–just how much seduction are these people really prepared to tolerate?

So just who’s corrupting who here? Specifically, where are these guys when they’re actually needed?

My curiosity is about a dog that isn’t barking. The dog in question is the (typically) snarling, chained junkyard cerberus known as the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. If the jobs of thousands of South Korean union workers–workers who have the right to organize, strike, and demand better and safer working conditions–were shipped off to Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei, or dozens of other countries where workers have some, many, or most of the same rights, but a fraction of the wages, the KCTU would have thousands of firebomb-wielding workers in the streets shouting “slave labor!!”

Contrast that with the meek, neutered retriever that lays placidly before the Kaesong fireplace, even as the jobs of the same famously militant unions’ workers really are being outsourced to a slave labor economy.

We know they are proposing to pay the workers at Kaesong just three percent of what they pay South Koreans. What do you suppose the punishment would be for organizing an unauthorized labor union there?

The uncharacteristic silence of the unions tells us much about whose interests they really serve. And don’t.

UPDATE: Well, this certainly looks like a worker safety issue. A South Korean worker (identified by the name Wang, which interestingly is not usually a Korean name) has fallen to his death at Kaesong. Will there be an investigation into the circumstances? Will the results be made public? Did he belong to a union? What will the union–or lacking one, the South Korean government–take any action to prevent similar accidents in the future?