정부수립 이후 1950년대 전반기, 노동쟁의에 대한 국가권력･자본의 대응과 노동자의 지위

Abstract

A struggle for organizing Joseon Electric Company’s trade union in 1949, a labor dispute of Joseon Spinning and Weaving Company in 1952 and coal miners’ strike in 1954 were typical labor disputes which happened up to the first half of the 1950s after establishment of the R.O.K government. This article looked into how the state power and the capital oppressed labor movement and how was worker’s status under the cold war system through these three examples of labor disputes. Management of the Joseon Electric Company was opposed to union organizing in the labor dispute and moreover began breaking the union in various means. As the strike with power outage impended, president Syngman Rhee intervened aggressively in the strike. The police exercised mighty force on behalf of the state power in the dispute of Joseon Spinning and Weaving Company. Syngman Rhee announced a warning statement when the dispute of Joseon Spinning and Weaving Company expanded into strike, and the dispute came to an end with giving rise to numbers of workers’ sacrifice because of his statement’s influence on that. The management ignored the regulations of the Labor Relations Act and responded by ‘stalling negotiations tactics’ during coal miner’s strike. The president Syngman Rhee warned about the general strike with emphasizing that capitalist and the workers must cooperate with each other. Furthermore, he tried to control the labor movement by detaching the military contingent. Workers were being who were fettered by a ‘Red’ discourse appeared during the dispute and had to practice incessant self-censorship as the ‘anticommunist subject’. Also as being whose human right was trampled down by the state power, the management and the police, workers were excluded from the conception of the human right which was stressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Workers became being who worked in compliance with military rules because of the unusual action which deployed the military contingent in each mining station and let it be in charge of labor administration. These workers were called by ‘Industrial Warrior’.