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The World is Our Picket Line
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Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 22:54:53 +0000
From: "Jagdish Parikh"
Dear Friends, Following article was written for upcoming issue of Asian Labour Monitor (published by Asia Monitor Resoruce Center, HK based labour support group).
Feel free to circulate or use it as you like.
We would appreciate your comments.
With greetings, jagdish
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The World is Our Picket Line
by Jagdish Parikh and PK Murphy
March 9, 1997
Recent -- and outlawed -- general strikes by Korean workers reaffirm that they stand in the forefront of the Asian trade union movement.
But beyond that, the strikers' breakthroughs in reaching supporters abroad opens up new possibilities for the labour movement in Asia, indeed, for labour worldwide. These breakthroughs are thanks to computer communications put out by or on behalf of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, a body with no legal status.
The KCTU is not alone in using the Web. The locked-out Liverpool dockers have for months been mobilising support online. International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers (ICEM) successfully used the Internet for their campaign against a multinational company Firestone.
What is distinct about the Korean situation, however, is that the strikes have become one of the best covered labour struggles in Asia, although English is not commonly used in Korea, even among trade unionists.
The KCTU distributed its sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, strike bulletins almost instantly in English to supporters abroad. Beginning with electronic mail to hundreds of supporters thousands of miles away and culminating in pages on the World Wide Web (fast becoming the most popular method of sharing information on the global network of computers commonly thought of as the Internet), the KCTU called for and got solidarity from trade unionists and their allies far beyond Korea's borders.
Some unions and individuals set up Web pages or links to Web pages that were covering events as they unfolded in Korea. As the situation intensified, news began to flow from e-mail list to e-mail list, from public conference to public conference, from Web site to Web site, almost as fast as it could be reported. One Canadian who corresponds with us told us that she knew of events in Korea a full two weeks before any part of the story made the news where she lives.
Korean strikers and their supporters formed a Telecommunication Taskgroup for the General Strike (TTGS), to mount a campaign on the electronic network. TTGS Web pages encouraged users to post solidarity messages online, let them read support messages to the KCTU and let them find out who else was reading the pages. Such Web page design illustrates how the medium can foster transparency and encourage participation by supporters, thereby bringing greater democracy to the ways we wage solidarity campaigns.
The KCTU's use of computer communications, however, did not spring up overnight. The more militant sectors of the union movement and of the student movement had begun to explore these means as far back as ten years ago.
Some within the Korean labour movement started to experiment with computer communications as far back as 1987. In those days modems were expensive and access to electronic communications hard to come by. Even so, a number of unions, labour support groups and others interested in labour issues had started private discussion groups in Korean. To our knowledge, none of this material was translated, so not much is known about the content of those discussions. But it is known that hundreds of users from the labour movement were using those forums regularly.
Korean Labour News -- one of the first daily newspapers for workers in Korean and a product of the militancy of the late 1980s -- at one point considered setting up a national electronic network to help its reporters to file stories. But the lack of appropriate software in Korean and the cost of setting up a national network hindered their plans.
As impressive as the KCTU's use of computer communications is, more could be done to make such communication more effective in the struggles that await us, wherever our local base may be. This is all the more necessary if we wish to reach out all those around the world who don't have full access to the Internet but whose support and solidarity is crucial.
In many instances, strike reports got distributed in ways that led to information overload and unnecessary duplication, making it hard to keep up to date. This could have been avoided by some additional technical help and through better international coordination. Those of us who are in a position to offer the help and to begin to organise better coordination need to be working on remedying these problems now if we don't want them to crop up again down the road.
It remains, however, that without computer communications, some -- perhaps many -- supporters outside of Korea likely wouldn't have known enough about the struggle in time to offer solidarity.
Selected On-line Resources on the Korean General Strikes
A) Those who have access to electronic mail may want to use the contacts noted here to publicise their struggles as well as to stay in touch with labour struggles worldwide.
1. Solidarity Messages
Send your message directly to KCTU by e-mailing KCTUINT@chollian.dacom.co.kr
Or send it through the TTGS at rys@member.sing-kr.org
2. Labr.Asia:
Labr.Asia, an online conference hosted by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), offers extensive and regular coverage of the Korean struggle and of labour movement in Asia. Labr.Asia is available to subscribers of of the APC. For more information, send your e-mail to: jagdish@labornet.apc.org
3. Labor-L
Labor-L is a moderated mailing list run out of Toronto.Though labour issues in the US and Canada predominate, the list also frequently posts news of labour and related struggles from around the world. On-the-spot reports of the Korean strikes, postings from LabourNet, calls for solidarity and responses to the calls circulated on this list. For more information, send your e-mail to: lanfran@yorku.ca
B) Selected Sites on the World Wide Web
Those who have access to the World Wide Web might want to visit the following Web pages to get a feel for how the Korean strikers and their supporters are using the Web to make it easier for allies abroad to mobilise solidarity.
1) The Korean General Strikes http://kpd.sing-kr.org/strike/index-e.html
This site is the best place to start. It covers the background, developments as they unfolded and brings readers up to date. Readers can also sign a protest message, read solidarity messages from world, read international coverage of the strikes and see photos of the strikes.
2) The Solinet Online Web Conference
Beginning on January 11, 1997, Solinet -- a Canadian trade union network run by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) -- launched an online conference about the Korean general strikes. Solinet and its conferences can be found at http://www.solinet.org
(Be warned that Solinet requires a browser that supports frames. Access to these pages are moderated and users must register with
Solinet.)
3) There are several links to Korean labour sites at Eric Lee's "Labour Movement and the Internet" Web pages. You can find them at http://www.solinet.org/LEE/labour04.html
Lee's links include the KCTU's official strike page.
4) LabourNet
http://www.labournet.org.uk/llb/1997/february/news6.html
This British-based site covers labour struggles in Britain, offers international coverage, and invites workers everywhere to post news of strikes and other labour struggles.
5) http://www.icem.org/
The site of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers carries a link to the Korean general strike page. The ICEM site also features updates on many international struggles. Recently, the Federation orgaised a cyber campaign against Firestone, the giant tyre transnational.
To reach the writers of this article, e-mail Jagdish Parikh at jagdish@igc.org
or PK Murphy at bi008@torfree.net ```
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