Depoliticize labor issues.

(From The Korea Herald)

The number of construction contracts awarded is plummeting, dampening the hope that domestic demand will rebound soon. A decline in wholesale and retail sales is yet another sign that domestic demand will not recover in the near future, contrary to earlier predictions by top economic policymakers, who said consumers and corporations would start to increase spending soon.

Given these, and other dire economic conditions, the nation can hardly afford to sustain industrial disruptions. Yet, trade unions have been flexing their muscles by mobilizing their members for strikes.

In what could be a prelude to full-blown summer labor strife, reportedly scheduled for mid-July, unionized workers at KorAm Bank have been staging a strike for a week. In addition, 100,000 workers, including 40,000 at Hyundai Motor Co., walked out of their worksites on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Little can be done to strikers, no matter what harm they may do to economic recovery, if their action is taken as a legitimate means of pressuring employers to raise wages and improve working conditions. All that the employers can do to end such strikes is to stand firm against them and sustain damage, or to seek a compromise on the union demands.

But it is an entirely different matter if a union launches a strike to promote its political agenda, as the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions pledged. It was simply wrong for the KCTU, a nationwide umbrella group for labor unions, to threaten to call a general strike if the government refused to scrap its plan to send 3,000 additional troops to Iraq.

The planned troop dispatch is a political issue, which is beyond the realm of labor. The KCTU stretched its claim too thin when it argued that the request not to send additional troops was "not a political demand but a demand based on the (workers') basic right to life." No matter what ...