Pending a court ruling, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union will be allowed to remain a legitimate trade union and exercise its right to engage in collective bargaining and take industrial action. The conditional permission was granted earlier in the week when the court accepted the liberal union’s request for an injunction against the administration’s move to deprive it of its legal status as a trade union.
What the court did on Wednesday was to order the administration to put on hold its decision to de-legalize the union until a court ruling is made on the case. It is nothing more and nothing less. As such, neither the union nor the administration should try to read anything else into it.
Yet, the union interprets the injunction to its advantage. It mistakenly claims it is little different from a court decision that it was illegal for the administration to deprive the union of its legal status as a trade union.
The injunction undoubtedly is a setback for the administration, which believes that the union has lost its legal status as it retains dismissed teachers as its members in violation of the law. Still, it remains cool-headed when it says it will try to prove in the trial that the action it took against the union was legitimate.
At the core of the conflict is whether or not the teachers’ union should be allowed to keep dismissed teachers as its members, as other trade unions provide membership to dismissed workers. The lower court’s decision is expected to be made in six or seven months if the trial proceeds without a hitch.
The administration claims that the teachers’ union is different from ordinary trade unions and subject to different regulations, as specified by a special law on teachers’ unions. It says public interest and professionalism and autonomy demanded of education were taken into consideration when the special law was enacted in 1999.
On the other hand, the union claims that the special law may prove to be unconstitutional as it restricts basic human rights. In addition, it directs public attention to recommendations from the National Human Rights Commission of Korea and the International Labor Union that the law be revised to allow the union to retain dismissed teachers as its members.
Now the liberal union may be tempted to ally itself with advocacy groups sympathetic to its cause and stage joint protest rallies, as it did in the past, in addition to fighting the case in the court. It is already claiming that the administration is engaged in “political suppression” by attempting to deprive the union of its legal status.
But the union will have to exercise self-restraint and help to keep its battle against the administration in check. That is what the court demanded of the union when it issued an injunction. In a statement it issued in accepting the union’s request, the court said it was concerned about the possibility that the conflict over the union’s legal status, if expanded, would undermine the nation’s legal stability and impair its educational environment.
