The South Korean general strike is fast moving toward a turning point. As union after union joins the strike, President Kim Young-san has decided to crush it by arresting union leaders now holed up in the Myongdong Catholic cathedral. Whatever the outcome, the Korean unions have already shown the general strike can be a powerful weapon to resist the wave of downsizing now washing away hard-won worker benefits throughout the advanced industrial world. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on labor and immigration issues.

Conventional wisdom has long held that industrial workers in the West are the dinosaurs in a new information-based economy and that as industry disappears, so does the power and importance of industrial-based labor movements.

But the labor unrest shaking South Korea today demonstrates that while millions of industrial jobs may have moved, they certainly haven't disappeared. By mounting the biggest general strike anywhere in the industrial world since the end of World War II, South Koreans are showing the world that workers in those jobs have real power.

The strikes sweeping South Korea have their base in the big auto plants, the steel mills and the shipyards. This is the heart of the Korean economy -- when work stops here, the stock market plunges and the whole structure begins to waver and shake.

The strikes grow directly out of the unrest of a decade ago, when workers organized new, militant unions in South Korea's heavy industry. That upsurge was so violent that it destabilized the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee and triggered the process that led to South Korea's democratization. Out of the pitched street battles in front of the factories, pitting workers against police, soldiers and company guards, a new labor movement was also born -- the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).

Although South Korea has been number one among the Asian tigers, Korean workers have no basic labor rights and the KCTU has no right to exist under Korean labor law. Its president, Kwon Young-kil, was himself on trial last year for illegal union activity and union leaders are routinely arrested during strikes for the crime of "disrupting business."

The Korean government precipitated the current unrest by passing a new law which, among other things, legalized the hiring of replacement workers, or scabs, during a strike. But the strikes are really inspired by the decade-long offensive launched by governments in Western Europe and the U.S. to strip away workers' hard-won social benefits. That offensive has finally hit South Korea.

With the new labor law making it much easier to lay off workers, the Korean government is helping Hyundai, Daewoo and other corporations controlled by South Korea's powerful capitalist cartels (chaebols) to shed thousands of workers while demanding greater production from those that remain.

If unchecked, this massive downsizing could repeat the story of the U.S. steel and auto industry at the end of the 1970s. Korean workers know they have reason to fear the economic devastation which industrial restructuring brought to Detroit and Youngstown.

The strike wave in South Korea has one feature that was missing in the U.S. and even in the more militant European actions. It is a general strike that has brought together not only manufacturing workers but those in the growing service sectors -- hospitals, education, mass media. And unlike the struggle of a decade ago, this time the KCTU has been joined by the more conservative Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU).

The FKTU was organized with the blessing of the Korean government, backed by the AFL-CIO and U.S. intelligence apparatus, to insulate the chaebols from more militant unionism. Together, they funneled money and resources to the FKTU. When workers rose against the chaebols a decade ago, they saw the FKTU as part of the structure of military rule. The Korean labor movement has been divided ever since.

Today, the anger of Korean workers has grown so great that the leaders of the FKTU know they must respond or lose all credibility. Moreover, by pulling the rug out from under the old cold warriors, the new leadership of the AFL-CIO has deprived the FKTU of U.S. support it once relied on.

The Korean unions are fighting for the same rights and economic standards workers struck for in France and Germany and which (in the case of prohibiting strikebreakers) U.S. workers wish they had. If their general strike prevails, it could prove the biggest shot in the arm to workers throughout the industrial world in decades.