TS

The previous, right-wing president, Park Geun-hye, was impeached over corruption, including her relationship with some of the country’s largest conglomerates, like the Samsung Corporation.

She and her government completely botched the attempted rescue of a ferry that capsized near Jeju Island in 2014, and over three hundred high school students and their teachers died needlessly as a result. Everywhere you go in South Korea now, people still wear the yellow ribbons that signify solidarity with the victims and anger at the sheer incompetence of the Park government.

And then, of course, Park had a relationship with a shaman, a sort of guru, who was not part of the government but who was reading her papers and writing her speeches. She began to look like a wacko.

The so-called Candlelight Movement was launched in response, a series of demonstrations calling for her removal. It was very peaceful. People stood with candles weekend after weekend. During months of peaceful assembly, there wasn’t a single injury or arrest. Finally, the National Assembly voted to impeach. A lot of the charges were upheld by the Constitutional Court, and now she’s in jail. As of November, she was still in her cell as her trial continues. She wasn’t held in the Ritz-Carlton, like the Saudi billionaires who were just arrested in Saudi Arabia.

The demonstrations had been organized by a pretty broad-based cross-section of civic organizations and labor unions. I interviewed Moon Jae-In two days before his election, at a time when he was way ahead in the polls. He told me his expected election win was a continuation of the democratic movement that started in 1960 with the revolution against Syngman Rhee, running through the 1980 Gwangju uprising, and now the Candlelight Movement. So there was a lot of hope connected with him.

Probably the most serious issue facing workers now is youth unemployment and underemployment. Fifty percent of laborers are classified as precarious workers. They don’t have full-time jobs. They’re hired by contract, they don’t have benefits.

The first thing Moon did as president was to go to Incheon Airport, where there are precarious workers employed by the government; he went to show solidarity and to say that the public sector should begin reforms by ending the system of precarious labor. Unions that backed him had made precarious work their number one issue in the elections, and appreciated that act.