Participants from Seoul will include Kim Ju-young and Kim Myoung-hwan, the respective heads of the
FKTU and KCTU, the officials said.
A month-long general strike led by two competing labor federations--the cooperative
FKTU and the militant KCTU--forced the Kim government to reluctantly consent to the revision of the reform legislation in February 1997.
"We, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, are here to defend the labour unions and labour movement in this land," said Kang Choong-ho, a spokesman for
FKTU.
There were many instances of male-dominated
FKTU affiliated unions being on the side of management when the firms were in dispute with the female workers (WCC 1987: 108).
The AFL-CIO, despite its pledge never to support government-controlled unions, financed and supported the
FKTU from 1971 until the late 1980s--with full knowledge of the government's penetration of the
FKTU.
General Park's 1961 "Plan for the Reorganization of Labor Groups" purged and reorganized the
FKTU as a puppet organization to "work toward national security by eliminating all pro-communist and counterrevolutionary elements and establish a system of unified industrial unionism to overcome organizational disorder and to prevent undisciplined labor disputes." The Park regime achieved a true regimentation of labor, especially after adopting the authoritarian Yushin constitution of 1971 (Gumings 1997:367-77).
In 1995, with a platform to build not only democratic labor movements but also "a truly democratic society," Korean workers finally founded the historically unprecedented KCTU in opposition to the
FKTU. For the first time, Korea had an independent trade union federation.
These actions prompted the
FKTU to threaten to join the general strike in an alliance with the KCTU.
But it failed to bring about significant change due to fierce opposition from the KCTU and the
FKTU, which staged the first and the biggest general strike in Korean history.
(4.) Ho Keun Song, Company Welfare in Korea: An Empirical Study (Seoul:
FKTU, 1996) (in Korean).
Among the nine workers' representatives five are from the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (
FKTU) and four from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).
According to local media, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (
FKTU) sent guidelines to its branches to obtain compensation for diverse allowances expected to be cut.