Unions raided for second day in a row

Social Affairs

Published: 19 Jan. 2023, 16:54 Updated: 19 Jan. 2023, 17:50

Unions raided for second day in a row

Investigators from the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency raid the office of a construction union affiliated with the Federation of Korean Trade Unions in Geumcheon District, southern Seoul on Thursday. [YONHAP]

Police on Thursday raided the offices of construction unions affiliated with two major umbrella labor organizations, a day after they raided ten locations to investigate separate allegations that trade union officials collaborated with North Korean agents.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency conducted search and seizure operations at five offices of a construction union in the Korean Confederation of Trade Union (KCTU) and three offices of a construction union in the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), officials said.

This police investigation focuses on suspicions that union officials forced employers to hire certain union members and extorted money from companies if they declined to hire union members.

Police also searched eight houses belonging to construction union officials.

Thursday’s raids came a day after the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and National Police Agency raided the KCTU’s headquarters in Jung District, central Seoul, as well the homes of four former and current KCTU executives in South Jeolla and Gyeonggi, the headquarters of the KCTU-affiliated Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union in Yeongdeungpo District, western Seoul, and a so-called “peace shelter” on Jeju Island — all to investigate allegations that trade union officials violated the National Security Act.

According to South Korean counterintelligence officials who spoke to the JoongAng Ilbo on condition of anonymity, the NIS and police agency’s investigation centers on a KCTU executive suspected of meeting with a North Korean agent from the Cultural Exchange Bureau, a department of Pyongyang’s ruling Workers’ Party, on multiple occasions from 2016 to 2019.

That bureau is responsible for conducting espionage operations against South Korea and establishing underground political organizations aimed at fomenting unrest.

The KCTU executive is suspected of recruiting at least three other suspects now targeted by the counterintelligence operation, including an official from the medical workers’ union, a former union organizer at a Kia Motors factory in Gwangju and the director of the Jeju shelter to establish a secret, underground organization to carry out the North Korean agent’s directives.

South Korean intelligence officials believe that the KCTU executive contacted or attempted to make contact with other North Korean agents at various locations in Asia, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Hanoi and Phnom Penh.

They also believe that all four suspects in the case were present for a meeting with a North Korean agent in Phnom Penh in September 2017.

According to counterintelligence officials, the KCTU executive is suspected of communicating with the North using a steganographic program developed by the Cultural Exchange Bureau.

South Korean authorities believe physical meetings between the suspects and North Korean agents stopped with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But after detecting signs that some of the suspects were preparing to travel abroad, intelligence officials requested search and seizure warrants, which a court approved earlier this week.

The KCTU has strongly protested the raids, claiming they represent “a crackdown by public security officials against the labor movement.”

Passed in 1948, the National Security Act bans behavior or speech that expresses support for the North Korean regime or communism or advocates the overthrow of the South Korean government.

Although the law was famously abused by authoritarian governments in the past, it has also been used in modern times to prosecute actual cases of sedition, such as in 2013, when it was invoked by the NIS to arrest and convict Lee Seok-ki, a lawmaker from the minor liberal Unified Progressive Party, for plotting a rebellion in the event of war between the Koreas.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]