Hanjin Heavy reaches tentative settlement on labor dispute in Busan

BUSAN (Yonhap News) ― Hanjin Heavy Industries & Construction hammered out a tentative agreement with its unionized workers on Wednesday to end an 11-month-long labor dispute sparked by the shipmaker’s massive layoffs.

The provisional deal calls for the shipmaker to reinstate within one year 94 former employees who were laid off in the scheme to downsize the workforce, according to people with knowledge about the agreement.

It also requires the Busan-based firm to deliver on what Hanjin Heavy chairman Cho Nam-ho promised in a parliamentary hearing to provide an aid package to dismissed workers. The National Assembly’s sub-committee on labor proposed benefit payments of 20 million won ($17,900) in October amid the relentless labor dispute, and the chairman accepted the parliamentary recommendation.

The deal, which remained tentative, will take effect formally the day one strike leader ends her protest.

Kim Jin-sook, a former employee of Hanjin Heavy’s predecessor, has staged a one-woman protest atop a 35-meter tower crane at the Yeongdo shipyard in Busan for 308 days straight.

She is only willing to come down from the crane and seal the deal if the laid-off workers accept the tentative agreement struck between the management and the labor representatives, labor union officials said.

Unionized workers have been on strike since last December when the mid-sized shipmaker released a plan to cut 400 manufacturing jobs in its loss-making Yeongdo and Dadaepo shipyards in Busan as part of cost-reduction efforts.

In line with the plan, the firm fired 172 employees in February, with 228 others leaving on a voluntary retirement scheme.

Buttressing the labor move, Kim, a member of the Korea Confederation of Trade Unions, began her protest in December from the crane.

The firm’s labor union plans to cast a vote among the workers in the afternoon over whether to pass the deal as a formal agreement to settle the long-standing dispute, the officials said.