A suicide note was found in Bae Dal-ho’s car after he committed suicide on 10 January near a cooling tower on the site where he worked.
Part of the note signed by Bae said, “Due to the company’s provisional seizure of my wage, I did not receive any pay for more than six months. No wage will be paid to me on this forthcoming payday, nor the day after tomorrow. But the most painful thing is to see my co-workers dismissed for union activities. Doosan should reinstate them.”
This book is more than a review of labour law, it is the only comprehensive review available of labour law in the Asia Pacific region. It investigates the impact of labour law on workers in 30 countries. It analyses trade union and labour activists’ responses to changes in labour law, and examines what labour law means for workers’ daily lives. Each chapter representing a country can be downloaded country wise for download below.
A Brazilian soccer team kissed the trophy in triumph after the final game of the 2002 World Cup tournament. The event hosted by South Korea and Japan lasted from 31 May to 30 June.
Last year, over 280 Chinese workers in a single textile factory located in South Korea demonstrated to demand payment of the legal minimum wage. The 280 workers were receiving as little as their counterpart workers in a subsidiary Korean-invested factory in China, where the cost of living is considerably less than in South Korea.
This dispute is complicated by the way the company divides and rules the workforce using a variety of hiring/contractual systems; similarly this report is complicated by the English words used to describe each group. The chart below hopefully simplifies, defines, and standardises the confusion.
The current statutory working week is 44 hours. The real working hours in the immediate aftermath of the economic crisis and the IMF-prescribed loan declined slightly due to corporate structural adjustment and slump in the operational rate of facilities. However, from 1999, working hours increased again.
This report presents the first systematic public analysis of the code of conduct monitoring methods employed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to inspect factory labour practices around the world. The author accompanied PwC auditors on factory inspections in China and Korea, and evaluated PwC's findings for a factory in Indonesia.
South Korea's economy has fallen into serious crisis since 1997 and is now under the control of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The current economic troubles were unexpected, but the causes seem to be rooted deep in the South Korean economic structure.
Every year, according to the International Labour Organisation’s [ILO] estimates. over 220,000 workers die in workplace accidents. This trend is being exacerbated by the globalisation of the world’s economy. The ILO recently concluded that the “acceleration of globalisation and liberalisation in Asia had positive repercussions on the volume of jobs but not the quality.”
1997 came in with a roar...One of the celebrated “tigers” of Asia witnessed the biggest general strike in the past forty-five years. South Korea’s workers and other citizens’ fight against the new and restrictive labour law, has had a significant impact on the labour situation in South Korea, which has reverberated throughout the region.
EPZs are viewed as union-free zones where workers are exploited and their rights to organise are brutally trampled. But the situation for EPZ workers cannot be truly understood if analysed in isolation of family, society, and the global marketplace. Conditions in the EPZs are a reflection and magnification of universal class and gender problems. Even though women are undervalued in the labour force, their families, governments, and employers benefit from and depend on their low cost (and often free) labour inside and outside the home.
Thousands of South Asians and Southeast Asians pour into Japan and the newly industrialized countries (NICs) in search of work each year. Labour migration is a world phenomenon, but national governments have failed to respond and even people's movements have not formulated coherent perspectives and agendas.
Almost a decade ago, thousands of people died painful deaths when the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal leaked poisonous gas. The death toll in the world’s worst industrial disaster has reached 16,000 people while half a million more were stricken with incurable illnesses.