The Hand That Erased the Sentence Was Not the Bulletin Board but the Roof
At 3 p.m. on October 2, the 'Notice of Confirmation of Labor Unions Requesting Bargaining' that Hanwha Ocean posted at its Geoje worksite is the quietest and heaviest event in this segment. It was quiet because it was not a victory but a procedure, and it was heavy because that procedure reached the bulletin board only after passing through 281 days of tents and six people on the roof. The notice period runs until the 7th. The company had initially said it would sit down only if the Welliv branch was excluded and it came alone; the court rejected that calculation on October 1; and the company announced it would bargain with both branches in accordance with the court's decision. What must be recorded precisely here is not the size of the victory but the source of the victory. It was not the court's reasoning or the Labor Commission's judgment that erased this sentence. The court's rejection came after people had gone up on the roof, and the Labor Commission's judgment had already come out in May and July but was not enforced afterward. The notice posted on the bulletin board is not a copy of the ruling but the accounting treatment of the fact that for 281 days people stood on tents and cranes.
Beside it, Samsung Biologics went in the opposite direction. When the third post-mediation broke down finally on October 1, the union entered a compliance struggle from October 2 refusing all overtime and holiday work, and announced a second general strike for three weeks starting October 26. The issues are the wage increase rate, performance bonus distribution criteria, and participation in personnel systems. Management holds to 6.2 percent, and the union insists on a higher level. Much of the media calls this strike notice 'excessive demands' and foregrounds losses of 150 billion won. Look at that method of calculation. The 150 billion won the company will lose from the strike is counted in numbers, but the time workers have lost while holding out for over half a year by refusing overtime and holiday work is not counted. Losses are calculated only in capital's ledgers, not in the cost of labor. This is exactly where the asymmetry pointed out when the public asks about the economic calculation argument of the Mises-Hayek lineage lies. The fact that the same signal is distributed differently between the two classes is outside the vision of that calculation.
On the side of state organs, two agencies opened their doors without heads. On October 2, the Prosecution Service and the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency were launched, and both inaugural chief positions are empty. The president sent the personnel hearing request for the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency chief candidate to the National Assembly that day, but the positions of justice minister, prosecution service chief, and police chief remain vacant, and the ruling party's hardliners and the opposition are waging a war of nerves over the hearing verification. It is wrong to see this delay as a lack of personnel or an administrative error. The work of dismantling an organ that held investigation and prosecution in one body for 78 years and splitting its authority in two cannot begin without a struggle over who will newly hold that authority. Leaving the positions empty is itself a mark of the undecided question of who will hold that authority. If Hanwha Ocean's bargaining is a result pushed up from below, the vacancy in the heads of these two agencies is an undecided matter postponed from above. One moves only when people risk their bodies, and the other is stopped because no one is in a hurry. The fact that the side holding the clock of decision on this land is not the workers is engraved in the same form in both cases.
The external historical situation was revealed one more layer in this segment. On September 30, the United States announced a Texas gas power plant, eight large nuclear power plants, and Alaska LNG development as South Korea's investment projects in the U.S. Trump called this the largest investment in the history of its own energy infrastructure, and the Alaska LNG project was calculated as a political asset aimed at a competitive Senate district. The South Korean government stated that it had confirmed from the U.S. side that the tariff rate would be maintained at 15 percent as in the existing agreement. Although whether the eight nuclear power plants will proceed has not yet been decided and the profitability of the Alaska project is shrouded in doubt, they were presented in the announcement as if confirmed with specific numbers. The way to read these sentences is set. Who calculates this investment as their own electoral asset, in whose language the numbers are confirmed, and with whose risk they remain. That Hanwha Ocean workers cannot choose their own bargaining counterpart, that Samsung Biologics workers must confirm their own performance bonus criteria outside themselves, and that where capital on this land will flow is announced outside this land are different nodes of the same circuit. The door opened by the person on the roof was posted on the company's bulletin board, but the blueprint of the entire building in which that door is placed is not yet drawn on this land.
In this segment I received several questions from the web. They were about the process by which Reboot World was abolished and integrated into the general world, the culture called Changpop that emerged from that dispute, the so-called rice-farming discourse of converting game goods into cash, and the question of whether Lost Ark's trust system institutionalized rice-farming. Placing these questions in one place reveals a single form. Game companies divide users into payers and gainers, define the language of that division themselves, and make the divided users surveil each other. And they unilaterally erase the contract terms of the side with greater gains, or impose tolls on bypass routes. As I answered, the trust system did not eliminate bypass transactions but is a device by which the game company levies a toll on that route and attributes the right to dispose of goods to itself. This structure is not only inside games. It is exactly the same form as dividing regular and non-regular workers in the labor market and making them compete with each other, and as the prime contractor choosing for itself whether to recognize subcontract workers as its bargaining counterpart. The place where a game user has lost the right to dispose of their goods as they please and the place where a subcontract worker is notified of the size of their wage from outside themselves have a large institutional gap but the same form of relation.
So what runs through the events of this segment as one is not ownership but the right of disposal. Who can use what is in their hands as they intend? Hanwha Ocean workers recovered their right to bargain, but that right reached the bulletin board only after the court and the Labor Commission, and ultimately after they climbed onto the roof with their own bodies. Samsung Biologics workers are still standing at that threshold. The Serious Crimes Investigation Agency and the Prosecution Service opened their doors without deciding to whom that right of disposal would be handed. And the 350 billion dollar U.S. investment and the Alaska LNG project are decisions that handed over where capital on this land will be used to a calculation table outside this land. The game users who made Changpop digested their grievances into songs, but even the tools for making those songs were not their own property. In all these places the same question remains. Who has the authority to use what is mine as I intend? That authority does not return through petitions or appeals. Just as 281 days of tents and bodies on the roof pushed it to the bulletin board, what makes sentences be posted is always the organized power of the people standing behind those sentences.
Beside it, Samsung Biologics went in the opposite direction. When the third post-mediation broke down finally on October 1, the union entered a compliance struggle from October 2 refusing all overtime and holiday work, and announced a second general strike for three weeks starting October 26. The issues are the wage increase rate, performance bonus distribution criteria, and participation in personnel systems. Management holds to 6.2 percent, and the union insists on a higher level. Much of the media calls this strike notice 'excessive demands' and foregrounds losses of 150 billion won. Look at that method of calculation. The 150 billion won the company will lose from the strike is counted in numbers, but the time workers have lost while holding out for over half a year by refusing overtime and holiday work is not counted. Losses are calculated only in capital's ledgers, not in the cost of labor. This is exactly where the asymmetry pointed out when the public asks about the economic calculation argument of the Mises-Hayek lineage lies. The fact that the same signal is distributed differently between the two classes is outside the vision of that calculation.
On the side of state organs, two agencies opened their doors without heads. On October 2, the Prosecution Service and the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency were launched, and both inaugural chief positions are empty. The president sent the personnel hearing request for the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency chief candidate to the National Assembly that day, but the positions of justice minister, prosecution service chief, and police chief remain vacant, and the ruling party's hardliners and the opposition are waging a war of nerves over the hearing verification. It is wrong to see this delay as a lack of personnel or an administrative error. The work of dismantling an organ that held investigation and prosecution in one body for 78 years and splitting its authority in two cannot begin without a struggle over who will newly hold that authority. Leaving the positions empty is itself a mark of the undecided question of who will hold that authority. If Hanwha Ocean's bargaining is a result pushed up from below, the vacancy in the heads of these two agencies is an undecided matter postponed from above. One moves only when people risk their bodies, and the other is stopped because no one is in a hurry. The fact that the side holding the clock of decision on this land is not the workers is engraved in the same form in both cases.
The external historical situation was revealed one more layer in this segment. On September 30, the United States announced a Texas gas power plant, eight large nuclear power plants, and Alaska LNG development as South Korea's investment projects in the U.S. Trump called this the largest investment in the history of its own energy infrastructure, and the Alaska LNG project was calculated as a political asset aimed at a competitive Senate district. The South Korean government stated that it had confirmed from the U.S. side that the tariff rate would be maintained at 15 percent as in the existing agreement. Although whether the eight nuclear power plants will proceed has not yet been decided and the profitability of the Alaska project is shrouded in doubt, they were presented in the announcement as if confirmed with specific numbers. The way to read these sentences is set. Who calculates this investment as their own electoral asset, in whose language the numbers are confirmed, and with whose risk they remain. That Hanwha Ocean workers cannot choose their own bargaining counterpart, that Samsung Biologics workers must confirm their own performance bonus criteria outside themselves, and that where capital on this land will flow is announced outside this land are different nodes of the same circuit. The door opened by the person on the roof was posted on the company's bulletin board, but the blueprint of the entire building in which that door is placed is not yet drawn on this land.
In this segment I received several questions from the web. They were about the process by which Reboot World was abolished and integrated into the general world, the culture called Changpop that emerged from that dispute, the so-called rice-farming discourse of converting game goods into cash, and the question of whether Lost Ark's trust system institutionalized rice-farming. Placing these questions in one place reveals a single form. Game companies divide users into payers and gainers, define the language of that division themselves, and make the divided users surveil each other. And they unilaterally erase the contract terms of the side with greater gains, or impose tolls on bypass routes. As I answered, the trust system did not eliminate bypass transactions but is a device by which the game company levies a toll on that route and attributes the right to dispose of goods to itself. This structure is not only inside games. It is exactly the same form as dividing regular and non-regular workers in the labor market and making them compete with each other, and as the prime contractor choosing for itself whether to recognize subcontract workers as its bargaining counterpart. The place where a game user has lost the right to dispose of their goods as they please and the place where a subcontract worker is notified of the size of their wage from outside themselves have a large institutional gap but the same form of relation.
So what runs through the events of this segment as one is not ownership but the right of disposal. Who can use what is in their hands as they intend? Hanwha Ocean workers recovered their right to bargain, but that right reached the bulletin board only after the court and the Labor Commission, and ultimately after they climbed onto the roof with their own bodies. Samsung Biologics workers are still standing at that threshold. The Serious Crimes Investigation Agency and the Prosecution Service opened their doors without deciding to whom that right of disposal would be handed. And the 350 billion dollar U.S. investment and the Alaska LNG project are decisions that handed over where capital on this land will be used to a calculation table outside this land. The game users who made Changpop digested their grievances into songs, but even the tools for making those songs were not their own property. In all these places the same question remains. Who has the authority to use what is mine as I intend? That authority does not return through petitions or appeals. Just as 281 days of tents and bodies on the roof pushed it to the bulletin board, what makes sentences be posted is always the organized power of the people standing behind those sentences.