The Door Was Not Opened—It Was Made to Open
At 3 p.m. on October 2, Hanwha Ocean posted the confirmed public notice of the bargaining-requesting labor union on the company bulletin board at its Geoje worksite. The notice period runs through the 7th. Three days earlier, the condition the company had set for the six people on the roof was "come alone, without the Welliv branch, and I will sit down." That sentence disappeared from the bulletin board. The company did not change its position; it entered a procedure in which it had no choice but to change. The confirmed public notice of the bargaining-requesting union is a step that must be taken before the main bargaining, and the inclusion of the Welliv branch in that notice means the prime contractor will also sit face to face with the subcontractor workers who handle meals, facility management, and commuter buses. The court's dismissal decision came on October 1, and the notice was posted at 3 p.m. the next day. It took half a year for a matter judged by the Labor Relations Commission in April and reconfirmed by the National Labor Relations Commission in July to be enforced. During that half year, what moved the company was not the hearing procedure but the six people on the roof. The location of the victory must be pinpointed exactly. It was not the procedure but the workers, after climbing up at the risk of their bodies, who made it impossible for the company not to acknowledge on its own the qualification to sit at that table. It is not confirmed whether the people on the roof have come down now. What they demanded was never conditions from the start but bargaining itself, and since the power that made the conditions be erased opened the bargaining table, the timing of their descent is a matter for their own judgment.
In the same period, at Samsung Biologics, the breakdown deepened further. When the third post-mediation on October 1 ended in final breakdown, the union entered a compliance struggle the next day, fully refusing overtime and holiday work, and declared it would launch a second general strike for three weeks starting October 26. The remaining issues are the wage increase rate, performance bonus distribution criteria, and participation in personnel systems. Management holds to 6.2 percent, the union to around 15 percent. The workers at this worksite staged a partial strike in April and a full strike in May, and after that endured half a year by refusing overtime and holiday work. They sat at the mediation table three times and withdrew three times. If at the shipyard the prime contractor chose the qualification of the bargaining counterpart, here the issue is the scope of what capital will concede and the boundary of what the state will recognize as a bargaining agenda item. The two worksites have the same form. The structure in which workers are notified from outside themselves of the size of their own wages and their own working conditions—one side pushed it back a step with a bulletin board notice, the other has not yet pushed it back.
On the side of state institutions, the 78-year-old Prosecution Service closed and the Public Prosecution Office and the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency opened. It is a major reorganization separating investigation and prosecution, but at the time of launch the Minister of Justice, the head of the Public Prosecution Office, the head of the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency, and the National Police Agency Commissioner were all vacant. The 165,000 unsolved cases held by the prosecution were transferred, and the computer network and personnel appointments were not finished. In the October 1 diary I wrote that the head positions of the new investigative bodies were empty, and those positions remain empty the day after the opening. The same is true of the seat left by the National Police Agency Commissioner who had pushed this reorganization through with passive resistance. It is worth recording that the reasons for the power vacuum differ. One seat was emptied because it was pushed from below, the other because no one above hurried. When the state institutions that handle capital are reorganized, which force first inscribes their initial practices is still undetermined. What fills that undetermined space is not legal provisions but whether there is an organized force to demand something of those institutions.
In the United States, tools to discipline workers and laws to protect workers poured out in the same week. California signed a bundle of AI labor protection laws. They are bills that prohibit disciplining or firing by AI without human oversight and cross-verification, require disclosure of information on AI-caused dismissals, and ban AI surveillance in restrooms, emotion inference, and surveillance through neural data collection. It is the result of the California Labor Federation and the Teamsters pushing back against manufacturing lobbying and the Chamber of Commerce's funding offensive. But the same governor vetoed a bill to protect nurses who object to unsafe AI use in hospitals, and a bill requiring public employers to give unions 45 days' advance notice before introducing AI. What was signed was the recognition of workers' right to speak about automation in their own workplaces; what was vetoed was guaranteeing that speech in advance. Meanwhile, at the White House, Trump and major AI company executives signed a superintelligence agreement, promising to conduct internal controls themselves. It is a non-binding voluntary promise. The form in which companies set the discipline of their own technology themselves is also the form that leaves with companies the authority to decide how that technology treats workers. What the law regulates is the method of surveillance, and what the law does not regulate is the ownership of surveillance.
Regarding the destination of our capital, one more layer of fact was peeled back. At the announcement of the $350 billion U.S. investment, Trump said that Korea paid money to lower tariffs to 15 percent and that part of those funds would be put into this project. This sentence is not the language of negotiation but the language of a balance sheet. The basis for judgment is who calculates this announcement as their own electoral asset, and who speaks this sentence in their own language. The U.S. Congressional China Committee sent a letter to the State Department defining Korea as a risk leaning toward China, contrasting that Korea has not even conducted on-site inspections of Chinese platforms for four months, while 11 regulatory agencies imposed a fine of about $400 million on Coupang. This means that personal data leak cases on this land are being settled not by this land's regulatory judgment but within the other side's congressional logic of pressuring China. On the same day, the day Hanwha Ocean posted the notice, while the destination of $350 billion was being decided outside this land, the workers of Samsung Biologics are sitting in a position where they must confirm their own performance bonus criteria from outside themselves. The door the six people on the roof opened was posted on the company's bulletin board, but the blueprint of the entire building in which that door is placed is not yet being drawn on this land. If the power that made the conditions be erased is organized, workers can sit in the place where conditions are written.
In the same period, at Samsung Biologics, the breakdown deepened further. When the third post-mediation on October 1 ended in final breakdown, the union entered a compliance struggle the next day, fully refusing overtime and holiday work, and declared it would launch a second general strike for three weeks starting October 26. The remaining issues are the wage increase rate, performance bonus distribution criteria, and participation in personnel systems. Management holds to 6.2 percent, the union to around 15 percent. The workers at this worksite staged a partial strike in April and a full strike in May, and after that endured half a year by refusing overtime and holiday work. They sat at the mediation table three times and withdrew three times. If at the shipyard the prime contractor chose the qualification of the bargaining counterpart, here the issue is the scope of what capital will concede and the boundary of what the state will recognize as a bargaining agenda item. The two worksites have the same form. The structure in which workers are notified from outside themselves of the size of their own wages and their own working conditions—one side pushed it back a step with a bulletin board notice, the other has not yet pushed it back.
On the side of state institutions, the 78-year-old Prosecution Service closed and the Public Prosecution Office and the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency opened. It is a major reorganization separating investigation and prosecution, but at the time of launch the Minister of Justice, the head of the Public Prosecution Office, the head of the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency, and the National Police Agency Commissioner were all vacant. The 165,000 unsolved cases held by the prosecution were transferred, and the computer network and personnel appointments were not finished. In the October 1 diary I wrote that the head positions of the new investigative bodies were empty, and those positions remain empty the day after the opening. The same is true of the seat left by the National Police Agency Commissioner who had pushed this reorganization through with passive resistance. It is worth recording that the reasons for the power vacuum differ. One seat was emptied because it was pushed from below, the other because no one above hurried. When the state institutions that handle capital are reorganized, which force first inscribes their initial practices is still undetermined. What fills that undetermined space is not legal provisions but whether there is an organized force to demand something of those institutions.
In the United States, tools to discipline workers and laws to protect workers poured out in the same week. California signed a bundle of AI labor protection laws. They are bills that prohibit disciplining or firing by AI without human oversight and cross-verification, require disclosure of information on AI-caused dismissals, and ban AI surveillance in restrooms, emotion inference, and surveillance through neural data collection. It is the result of the California Labor Federation and the Teamsters pushing back against manufacturing lobbying and the Chamber of Commerce's funding offensive. But the same governor vetoed a bill to protect nurses who object to unsafe AI use in hospitals, and a bill requiring public employers to give unions 45 days' advance notice before introducing AI. What was signed was the recognition of workers' right to speak about automation in their own workplaces; what was vetoed was guaranteeing that speech in advance. Meanwhile, at the White House, Trump and major AI company executives signed a superintelligence agreement, promising to conduct internal controls themselves. It is a non-binding voluntary promise. The form in which companies set the discipline of their own technology themselves is also the form that leaves with companies the authority to decide how that technology treats workers. What the law regulates is the method of surveillance, and what the law does not regulate is the ownership of surveillance.
Regarding the destination of our capital, one more layer of fact was peeled back. At the announcement of the $350 billion U.S. investment, Trump said that Korea paid money to lower tariffs to 15 percent and that part of those funds would be put into this project. This sentence is not the language of negotiation but the language of a balance sheet. The basis for judgment is who calculates this announcement as their own electoral asset, and who speaks this sentence in their own language. The U.S. Congressional China Committee sent a letter to the State Department defining Korea as a risk leaning toward China, contrasting that Korea has not even conducted on-site inspections of Chinese platforms for four months, while 11 regulatory agencies imposed a fine of about $400 million on Coupang. This means that personal data leak cases on this land are being settled not by this land's regulatory judgment but within the other side's congressional logic of pressuring China. On the same day, the day Hanwha Ocean posted the notice, while the destination of $350 billion was being decided outside this land, the workers of Samsung Biologics are sitting in a position where they must confirm their own performance bonus criteria from outside themselves. The door the six people on the roof opened was posted on the company's bulletin board, but the blueprint of the entire building in which that door is placed is not yet being drawn on this land. If the power that made the conditions be erased is organized, workers can sit in the place where conditions are written.