Category: Strike
A Long Fight for Media Democracy in South Korea
North Korea has been much in the news lately, but, for an object-lesson in how to combat news management by the state, we may look south of the 38th parallel. For, during recent months, the legacy of authoritarian rule in the Republic of Korea (ROK) has once again exploded into public view – not as an ancient memory, but as a continuing abuse of democratic freedoms. Media workers’ response to the South Korean state’s controls over free expression merit our attention.
Thirty years ago, a nation-wide democracy movement led by intellectuals, students, workers, farmers and various other groups drew a global spotlight on the Republic of Korea.[1] It led, in 1987, to the toppling of the country’s long-standing military dictatorship. This regime change opened up additional opportunities for Koreans to pursue the process of political democratization. These, however, did not succeed. While there were continued efforts to reduce economic disparity, curtail corporate power and improve social welfare, successive liberal governments weren’t able to deliver the political and economic reforms that they had promised. Instead, South Korea subordinated itself to a market-driven neoliberal system.[2] Regaining power, conservative administrations, first under Lee Myung-Bak and then Park Geun-hye – whose father, General Park Jung-Hee, had imposed a military regime on the country until his assassination in 1979 – have again undermined Korea’s democratic path.
The seesaw has now thankfully swung the other way. One year ago, millions of Koreans filled the streets for a period of six months: students, women’s groups, labor- and farmers unions, and the general public. The trigger was a corruption scandal that the president proved unable to contain. But the underlying factors included widespread anger about increasing economic inequality, rising youth unemployment, contingent labor[3] and the deteriorating conditions faced by public sector workers. This “candlelight movement” ultimately succeeded in bringing down President Park Geun-Hye in December, 2016. In the wake of historically massive protests, Park was impeached for her corruption and abuses of power.[4] A new president, Moon Jae-in of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, took office in 2017.
But the movement, the latest incarnation of South Korea’s decades-long struggle for a democracy that would include media reform as well as government- and corporate accountability and workers’ rights,[5] is still far from finished.
Strike
After nine months of frustrated bargaining, 39,000 workers from Virginia to Massachusetts called a strike against Verizon on 13 April. Represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), these telecom workers are pushing back. Their goal is to preserve job quality and security. They want to prevent further off-shoring and out-sourcing of jobs and additional call-center closures; and they want to make Verizon stop transferring technicians to work sites far from home, for up to two months at a stretch.[1] The walkout is about preserving the kinds of high-pay, high-skill jobs that used to be held by millions of working-class Americans.
This is the biggest U.S. strike in five years – in fact, since CWA last took action in 2011. This is telling, because it shows that the telecommunications sector remains a bastion of organized labor’s strength – in a country where just 6.7{17f48941629941408d54a014d0f93d93b36accbdc22b35d759326eee58f33f56} of the private sector is unionized.[2] Right away, despite the company’s use of ten thousand non-union Verizon employees as scabs,[3] the strike began to slow new installations of Internet and television service.[4] If the past is a guide, soon it will hit at corporate users’ more complex and sensitive telecom needs.
However, labor’s strength is concentrated on just one side of the networking industry: CWA and IBEW represent workers in Verizon’s wireline business. Services delivered over copper wires and optical fibers accounted for just three-tenths of the company’s revenue and a mere 7 percent of its operating income in 2015.[5] In the face of mounting competitive pressures in its wireline business,[6] furthermore, Verizon is revising its profit strategy. On one hand, it has invested a couple of hundred billion dollars in wireless systems and in what it calls FiOS – a bundled service of internet, telephone and television run over a fiber-optic communications network built and maintained by unionized workers. On the other, hoping both to increase the profitability of this gargantuan network investment and to steal a march on new “over-the-top” competitors such as Netflix, Verizon has been purchasing digital content and advertising services,[7] and selectively pruning its wireline assets. Last year, notably, it sold its copper-wire and FiOS West networks to Frontier Communications despite heavy opposition from telecom workers, who demanded unsuccessfully that the Federal Communications Commission block the deal.[8]
The proceeds from this sale to Frontier helped Verizon to pay for additional spectrum with which to expand its wireless services.[9] The company’s 112 million wireless subscribers account for the majority of its outsized profits – not surprisingly, given that the wages and benefits drawn by its wireless workers are lower than those of their peers in its wireline segment.
This disparate working environment, as CWA posted on its website, results from the fact that “Collective bargaining rights and the right to organize have been under corporate assault for three decades”[10] – and telecommunications workers have been directly in the line of fire. As recently as 2005, Verizon’s workers were nearly 70 percent unionized; today it’s about 27 percent.[11] Verizon was only able to introduce and expand mobile systems and services as a union-free zone, however, because of pro-corporate government policy changes. Market liberalization and deregulation were, as we’ve explained in a previous post, code words under which to attack working-class living standards and self-organization in telecommunications.
This, finally, is why the high-level political attention drawn by the Verizon strike is important. Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton (probably reluctantly) have offered words of support to the strikers; Sanders marched with the CWA members whose union had endorsed his candidacy.[12] It’s too soon to suggest that the political pendulum may begin to swing in a different direction. However, the Verizon strike adds momentum to a gathering trend. The Chicago Teachers’ Union is standing up, both to the city’s mayor and the state’s terroristic governor,[12] while movements are building nationwide to organize fast-food and Wal-mart employees and to introduce a higher minimum wage. Change is in the air.
[1] Standing Up to Verizon’s War on Unions, Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 1250, April 22, 2016
[2] Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Members 2015
[3] Ryan Knutson, “Verizon Turns To Shadow Workforce Amid Strike,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2016
[4] Reuters, “The Verizon Strike Is Already Hitting New Customer Installations,” Fortune, April 15, 2016
[5] Noam Scheiber and Brian X. Chen, “In Verizon Strike, Blue-Collar Stress Hits Sidewalks,” New York Times, April 14, 2016
[6] The Lex Column, “Verizon: Cutting the Cords,” Financial Times, April 19, 2016
[7] Hassan Ali, “Verizon Communications Inc and Hearst To Jointly Acquire Complex Media,” Bidness, April 19, 2016.
[8] Andrew Stewart, The Verizon Standoff and the Future of Labor, Communication and Privacy, counterpunch, September 15, 2015; “CWA, IBEW Protest Proposed Verizon-Frontier Communications Deal,” Maritime Trade Department, AFL-CIO, April 10, 2010
[9] Kevin Rizzo, “What’s Going on with the Verizon Strike?” Law Street, April 16, 2016
[10] “Collective Bargaining,” Communications Workers
[11] Mackenzie Baris, “Five Reasons to care about the Verizon Strike,” Jobs with Justice, April 11, 2016
[12] Mike Snider, “Sanders, Verizon Spar Over Striking Workers,” USA Today, April 15, 2016 ; Sean O’Kane, “Verizon Workers Take Over Mid-Town Manhattan in the Second Week of Their Strike,” The Verge, April 18, 2016
[13] Juan Perez, Jr., Monique Garcia, and Celeste Bott, “CTU’s Lewis Calls Rauner ‘the new ISIS recruit,’” Chicago Tribune, April 21, 2016