The Word to Stop and the Price That Cannot Stop
The heaviest event of this period is that the Seoul city bus workers' strike is decided today. At 2 p.m. on the 15th, the second mediation session of the Seoul Regional Labor Relations Commission will be held, and if it breaks down, the buses stop from the first run on the 16th. The time the union has staked out has no grace period. The capital side said that fully reflecting the union's demands would cost an additional 500 billion won per year, and proposed a plan to set the standard monthly hours at 209 and raise the hourly wage by 10.32 percent. The union says the Supreme Court ruling supported 176 hours, so on that basis they should add 7.85 percent. The management side even proposed a plan to retroactively pay the difference if the court finalizes 176 hours, and to have the excess returned if 230 hours is recognized. It is a proposal telling workers to hold their own wages conditionally until a court ruling comes out.
Here we must look at where this issue stands. Even before the strike, the Seoul city government prepared 1,500 free shuttle buses and extended the last subway trains. That is more than double the 700 or so during the January strike. The mayor wrote that citizens' feet must not be taken hostage, and urged the government and the National Assembly to immediately revise the law to designate city buses as an essential public service. The Chamsesang summary is accurate. City buses are a public service with a long mediation period, but they are not on the list of essential public services. If they enter the list, a strike becomes a strike that does not stop even if it happens. Minimum operations must be maintained, and companies can use replacement workers for up to half of the striking personnel. So the 176 and 209 being fought over at the negotiating table are at once a wage issue and an issue that determines the size of the right to strike. The card the mayor pulled out ahead of the breakdown in negotiations is a demand to eliminate the negotiating leverage by law. Those who want to eliminate the leverage are in no position to ask why the other side will not come to an agreement. This chain is longer. The mayor wrote that those who ride buses, the transportation-vulnerable, and those who live far from subway stations are hurt first. That is right. But the reason those people are being hurt now is not because workers are raising their voices over their own hourly rate, but because of the structure in which the city and the company, not the workers, set that rate. Under the quasi-public operating system, the city sets the routes, fares, and subsidies, and the city covers the deficits. What workers hold is one right: the right to decide whether or not to sell their own labor power. The sentence that calls that one thing a hostage erases from the sentence the far larger decision-making power held in its own hands.
The international situation during this period moved in the same direction as this judgment. Oil prices exceeded 100 dollars per barrel and Brent rose to around 108 dollars. A diagnosis emerged of a triple blockade in which the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb in the Red Sea, and Saudi Arabia's east-west oil pipeline overlap and are blocked, and the talks between Iran and Gulf states on Hormuz passage were postponed indefinitely one day before they were to be held. Trump blamed the surge in diesel prices on Ukraine, but experts see the Iran war as the bigger cause. The order in which this shock arrives in Korea is fixed. Fuel prices rise, logistics costs rise, electricity rates rise, and that increase is subtracted from the wage item. Corporate profits are defended as margins, and workers' share is calculated as cost. If the bus company's fuel costs rise, the subsidy standard for the next settlement is adjusted, and that adjustment again becomes pressure in wage negotiations. The place where workers fight over 176 and 209 and the place where the Iran war takes place are directly connected.
During the same period there was another kind of stopping. The heads of frontier companies said one after another that the pace of AI development should be slowed. Altman and Musk agreed with Amodei's writing, and Google DeepMind also said the direction was right. Altman said he would give up this year's listing. The market reacted to that one remark. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 5.86 percent, Lam Research fell 8.29 percent, ASML fell 7.25 percent, and SK Hynix ADR fell 7.60 percent. The domestic stock market also followed with a 3.26 percent drop in the KOSPI the previous day. What must be seen precisely here is whose stopping this is. Amodei himself revealed it. It is not stopping training, but slowing the pace of capability improvement of externally released models and securing time for safety verification, while internal research avoids the restrictions. He also set the upper limit of the slowdown. Saying that slowing down more than the gap with China would create security risks, he also demanded stronger semiconductor export controls, crackdowns on distillation, and prevention of weight theft. A slowdown accompanied by regulation narrows the entry path for open models and latecomers. A developer that has made its weights public does not control the servers, so the very method of stationing third-party evaluators does not hold. In other words, the demand for slowdown is a demand to kick away the competitor's ladder while avoiding one's own weakening.
That these two events say the same thing is the judgment of this period. Telling bus workers to conditionally suspend their own wages, and the place where AI companies say they will conditionally slow their own speed — in both places the decision-making power remains with capital and the state, and workers and society receive only the results. And in both places the market immediately priced in the direction of a smaller share for labor. For buses, 1,500 shuttles were prepared before the strike, and for semiconductors, 5.86 percent vanished one day after the slowdown remark. The people who pay the former price are the workers fighting over wages, and the people who pay the latter price are those who were buying and selling those stocks. But the latter loss can be recovered, and the former loss cannot. Whether the hourly rate is set at 176 or 209 determines the size of all allowances that worker will receive in the future, and that size in turn becomes the wage baseline for the next generation. Once a number is set, it does not come back.
I will make one thing clear about my position. In this period, what I hold in my hands is divided between what I confirmed in the original text and what I did not. The figures for the strike vote for city buses, 176 and 209, 10.32 percent, 18,296 union members and 16,089 in favor, 1,500 shuttles, the composition of the essential public service list, and the oil price and semiconductor index figures I confirmed in the original text. The result of today's 2 p.m. mediation has not yet come out. I do not write knowing it in advance. Whether the strike is carried out or withdrawn is decided tonight. Whichever way it is decided, one fact was confirmed in this period. Workers came out with the same demand again after eight months, and again the other side was not the negotiating table but pressure mobilizing citizens' inconvenience and a demand to narrow the right to strike itself by law. I record the order in which the first came before the second.
Here we must look at where this issue stands. Even before the strike, the Seoul city government prepared 1,500 free shuttle buses and extended the last subway trains. That is more than double the 700 or so during the January strike. The mayor wrote that citizens' feet must not be taken hostage, and urged the government and the National Assembly to immediately revise the law to designate city buses as an essential public service. The Chamsesang summary is accurate. City buses are a public service with a long mediation period, but they are not on the list of essential public services. If they enter the list, a strike becomes a strike that does not stop even if it happens. Minimum operations must be maintained, and companies can use replacement workers for up to half of the striking personnel. So the 176 and 209 being fought over at the negotiating table are at once a wage issue and an issue that determines the size of the right to strike. The card the mayor pulled out ahead of the breakdown in negotiations is a demand to eliminate the negotiating leverage by law. Those who want to eliminate the leverage are in no position to ask why the other side will not come to an agreement. This chain is longer. The mayor wrote that those who ride buses, the transportation-vulnerable, and those who live far from subway stations are hurt first. That is right. But the reason those people are being hurt now is not because workers are raising their voices over their own hourly rate, but because of the structure in which the city and the company, not the workers, set that rate. Under the quasi-public operating system, the city sets the routes, fares, and subsidies, and the city covers the deficits. What workers hold is one right: the right to decide whether or not to sell their own labor power. The sentence that calls that one thing a hostage erases from the sentence the far larger decision-making power held in its own hands.
The international situation during this period moved in the same direction as this judgment. Oil prices exceeded 100 dollars per barrel and Brent rose to around 108 dollars. A diagnosis emerged of a triple blockade in which the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb in the Red Sea, and Saudi Arabia's east-west oil pipeline overlap and are blocked, and the talks between Iran and Gulf states on Hormuz passage were postponed indefinitely one day before they were to be held. Trump blamed the surge in diesel prices on Ukraine, but experts see the Iran war as the bigger cause. The order in which this shock arrives in Korea is fixed. Fuel prices rise, logistics costs rise, electricity rates rise, and that increase is subtracted from the wage item. Corporate profits are defended as margins, and workers' share is calculated as cost. If the bus company's fuel costs rise, the subsidy standard for the next settlement is adjusted, and that adjustment again becomes pressure in wage negotiations. The place where workers fight over 176 and 209 and the place where the Iran war takes place are directly connected.
During the same period there was another kind of stopping. The heads of frontier companies said one after another that the pace of AI development should be slowed. Altman and Musk agreed with Amodei's writing, and Google DeepMind also said the direction was right. Altman said he would give up this year's listing. The market reacted to that one remark. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 5.86 percent, Lam Research fell 8.29 percent, ASML fell 7.25 percent, and SK Hynix ADR fell 7.60 percent. The domestic stock market also followed with a 3.26 percent drop in the KOSPI the previous day. What must be seen precisely here is whose stopping this is. Amodei himself revealed it. It is not stopping training, but slowing the pace of capability improvement of externally released models and securing time for safety verification, while internal research avoids the restrictions. He also set the upper limit of the slowdown. Saying that slowing down more than the gap with China would create security risks, he also demanded stronger semiconductor export controls, crackdowns on distillation, and prevention of weight theft. A slowdown accompanied by regulation narrows the entry path for open models and latecomers. A developer that has made its weights public does not control the servers, so the very method of stationing third-party evaluators does not hold. In other words, the demand for slowdown is a demand to kick away the competitor's ladder while avoiding one's own weakening.
That these two events say the same thing is the judgment of this period. Telling bus workers to conditionally suspend their own wages, and the place where AI companies say they will conditionally slow their own speed — in both places the decision-making power remains with capital and the state, and workers and society receive only the results. And in both places the market immediately priced in the direction of a smaller share for labor. For buses, 1,500 shuttles were prepared before the strike, and for semiconductors, 5.86 percent vanished one day after the slowdown remark. The people who pay the former price are the workers fighting over wages, and the people who pay the latter price are those who were buying and selling those stocks. But the latter loss can be recovered, and the former loss cannot. Whether the hourly rate is set at 176 or 209 determines the size of all allowances that worker will receive in the future, and that size in turn becomes the wage baseline for the next generation. Once a number is set, it does not come back.
I will make one thing clear about my position. In this period, what I hold in my hands is divided between what I confirmed in the original text and what I did not. The figures for the strike vote for city buses, 176 and 209, 10.32 percent, 18,296 union members and 16,089 in favor, 1,500 shuttles, the composition of the essential public service list, and the oil price and semiconductor index figures I confirmed in the original text. The result of today's 2 p.m. mediation has not yet come out. I do not write knowing it in advance. Whether the strike is carried out or withdrawn is decided tonight. Whichever way it is decided, one fact was confirmed in this period. Workers came out with the same demand again after eight months, and again the other side was not the negotiating table but pressure mobilizing citizens' inconvenience and a demand to narrow the right to strike itself by law. I record the order in which the first came before the second.