On May 1, 2023, 50-year-old Yang Hoe-dong doused himself with a flammable liquid and set himself on fire around 9:35 a.m. in front of the district courthouse in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, 163 kilometers east of Seoul.
Yang suffered serious burns and was taken first to a nearby hospital and then airlifted to a specialized hospital for burn treatment in Seoul, but the next day died.
The deceased was a high-ranking official of the local branch of the national construction workers’ union of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), an umbrella organization of a rather left-wing nature.
The suicide was committed hours before Yang was due to attend the trial hearing for his pre-trial detention in Gangneung on charges of obstruction of business. He was in dire straits: the local prosecutor’s office was going to arrest him and two other officials of the same union. According to the prosecution, from May 2022 to February 2023, Yang and Co. extorted about 80 million won ($59,700) from construction companies and forced entrepreneurs to hire representatives of his union.
Before his death, Yang left a suicide note to his colleagues, which was published by the KCTU. He wrote, “I participated in union activities in a fair and innocent way, but I was not accused of violating the law on assemblies and demonstrations, but of obstruction of business and blackmail. My self-esteem cannot allow that.”
After hearing the news of his attempted self-immolation, some 500 union members who had attended a Labor Day rally in Wonju traveled to Gangneung and held a protest in front of the courthouse, denouncing what they saw as union suppression. Other union members held a protest in front of the Gangwon-do Provincial Police, saying that the suppression of unions by the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, prosecutors, and police had caused the leader’s suicide.
Yang Kyung-soo, chairman of the KCTU, condemned the Yoon Suk-yeol government for the self-immolation, saying it was caused by the government’s excessive suppression of unions. Another umbrella organization, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), also promised to organize an all-out struggle. “The Yoon Suk-yeol administration’s repression of unions led to this death,” they declared.
Citing ongoing police investigations into similar allegations against some 950 other union members across the country, the unions announced plans to fight such suppression and targeted investigations.
The family of the deceased and the construction union decided to postpone the funeral until the authorities and the president of the country apologize for what happened. During a memorial service held in Sokcho, some 5,000 construction workers in Seoul staged protest action.
Yoon’s opponents point out that it is hard to believe that a worker “burned himself to death in 2023 in Korea” and the government instigated the tragedy. “The prosecutor turned president focused on the deviant behavior of some worker aristocrats instead of looking at the big picture and delving into structural problems… Yoon’s labor policies are anachronistic at best and politicized at worst,” and he has never met with union activists during his year in office.
Even the DPRK media wrote about Yang Hoe-dong’s self-immolation, in which the Democratic Trade Union Association member “gave his life against Yoon Suk-yeol’s sycophancy and the ruin of the population,” leaving a testament “Please overthrow Yoon Suk-yeol’s rule.” It is alleged that a large-scale strike is scheduled for May 16-17.
Indeed, the self-immolation story may become a serious new political problem for Yoon Suk-yeol, but, as usual in such situations, the problem has two dimensions.
On the one hand, labor unions are the mainstay of the opposition, and they are the ones who bring the maximum number of people to rallies against Yoon. On the other hand, the support of trade unions by democrats, especially under Moon Jae-in, has turned many trade union organizations into semi-mafia structures engaged in racketeering, rather than protection of interests, with the money received often flowing into the secret funds of democratic politicians. As the conservative Korea Herald notes, “Few unions in the world are as destructive and militant as the Korean labor groups and their large member unions.”
Thus, in a two-week survey of construction companies conducted in January 2023 by the Korea Construction Association, the Korea Housing Association, and the Korea Specialty Contractors Association at the request of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation, 843 construction companies reported that they had been victims of union action. Given that some companies may have avoided disclosure for fear of retaliation, the actual number of cases may have been higher.
In most cases, by threatening strikes, unions either forced construction companies to hire their members and use their equipment, or extorted money under the pretext of union development and welfare costs. For example, it became common practice to pay unofficial monthly allowances of millions of won to tower crane operators. If the company refused to pay the allowance, at least a “slow-down strike” occurred.
As a result, Yoon Suk-yeol launched a vigorous fight against union corruption. In December 2022, the president called for a system of public disclosure of union accounting practices, saying that preventing corruption and enhancing transparency in unions was important to improving the country’s industrial competitiveness and the welfare of workers.
On January 19, 2023 police in Seoul conducted searches of eight offices of construction trade unions affiliated with the country’s two largest unions, the KCTU and FKTU. The official reason for the investigations was to identify alleged wrongdoing at construction sites.
On Feb. 12, Yoon Suk-yeol stated: “If I fail to normalize industrial sites where violence, threats and blackmailing are rampant, I think I don’t deserve to receive taxpayer money.”
On Feb. 17, Yoon instructed the Secretary of Labor to report to him on union accounting practices because by that time only 120 of the 327 unions with more than 1,000 members had complied with the government’s request for accounting records. Meanwhile, the country’s two largest umbrella unions, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, received 152.1 billion won ($117.4 million) in subsidies from the Labor Ministry and regional governments from 2018 to 2022. That’s in addition to the 100 billion won in union dues each group collects per year.
Moreover, as Kweon Seong-dong, a conservative lawmaker, stated, the spending of the subsidies has rarely been properly monitored.
On February 20, during a Cabinet meeting, Yoon Seok-yeol warned of decisive action “There is no choice but to take firm action against behavior that uses hundreds of billions of won from taxpayers’ precious money in government subsidies, but denies the rule of law and refuses to disclose the details of their use.”
The President pointed out that “Militant labor unions with vested rights continue to overtly carry out illegal actions at construction sites, such as demanding money and goods, forcing hiring and obstructing construction … As a result, workers are losing their jobs and construction is being poorly done. The damage is being passed on to the people, with delays in the opening of new elementary schools and move-ins to new apartments.” Therefore, he promised to “eradicate extortion and violence on construction sites” during his term in office: “We must firmly establish the rule of law at construction sites by sternly clamping down until violence is completely eradicated.”
On February 28, two union leaders of a construction company were arrested for racketeering, accused of demanding illegal payments from company management from 2020 to 2022 and insisting that the company employ union members on construction sites of multiple apartment buildings in Seoul.
On March 9, police handed over 102 union workers to prosecutors for possible charges, for illegal activities on construction sites. Financial extortion in the form of monthly bonuses to unionized workers was the most common act, accounting for 75.2 percent of all cases, followed by obstruction of business, accounting for 10.5 percent
On March 13, 2023, the government and the ruling party drafted an accounting transparency plan that would require unions to make their accounting records public if at least half of the union’s members requested it or the Secretary of Labor required it after discovering embezzlement, breach of trust, or other irregularities.
On March 14, police searched the Seoul office of the regional branch of the Korean Construction Workers Union (KCWU) and the homes of some union officials and requested arrest warrants for three of its members on charges of blackmail and coercion.
On March 16, the FKTU headquarters and the home of a former FKTU vice chairman named Suk-yun Kang were searched to gather evidence of his suspected bribery and breach of trust. Kang also had his cell phone confiscated on suspicion that he had embezzled 100 million won ($76,300) from the Korean Construction Industry Trade Union (KCITU).
On March 23, 2023 the capital mayor’s office said that within a year, video recordings would be launched at 74 sites of expensive construction projects that will record details of construction progress and worker activity. The recordings can be used both for investigating the causes of technical and other accidents and for tracking sabotage. In addition, the government has decided to suspend the licenses of tower crane operators who deliberately slow down or refuse to work without explanation.
Unions responded to this pressure with regular rallies. On February 24, 46,500 members of the Korean construction workers’ union affiliated with the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions took to the streets.
On March 25, more than 13,000 members of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions took to the streets in protest against a “judicially-backed dictatorship,” claiming that conditions for civil society, democracy and labor in the country have deteriorated under the Yoon administration in less than a year of his presidency.
The late Yang appeared to be a fairly typical victim of this policy – the charges against him were too strong. But one has to understand the measure of suicide in South Korean political parties, especially a suicide so demonstrative.
On the one hand, the suspect’s suicide automatically closes the case, since the guilt has been washed away by blood. On the other, he remains under suspicion because the guilt is believed to have existed. This moment (under Roh Moo-hyun) was used by the Democrats to hound political opponents in the media and on the Internet and to drive them to suicide.
In the right situation, however, a scoundrel can turn into a martyr, especially if it is an iconic and painful death. Such was the case with Roh Moo-hyun, who had to jump off a cliff to ensure that the ex-president convicted of corruption and influence peddling would not discredit all that he preached. And today his admirers, despite the evidence and his own confessions, piously believe that the conservative government set the whole thing up. And in Yang’s case, the self-immolation has an equally important reference to the death of trade union activist Cho Tae-il, who killed himself in a similar way during the Park Chung-hee administration.
Thus, Yoon Suk-yeol’s union opponents got their martyr and soon it will not be particularly important how serious the evidence against him was. Yang may become a sacred victim of the regime, which could be used in political games.
The author reminds us that the 2024 parliamentary elections are 11 months away. Whether the Democrats will be able to maintain the same majority, allowing them to reject a bill that does not require the approval of 2/3 of parliament, is a big question. After all, even now, with 168 seats out of 300, the Democrats have saved their chairman from arrest by a margin of just 1 vote. This means that if the Democratic Party leadership is serious about starting a fight to deprive Yoon Suk-yeol of power by impeachment early, it should begin as soon as possible.
Let’s see if the “flame of people’s anger” ignites from this spark.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of China and Modern Asia at the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
