Manslaughter.

      Work is glorified in this capitalist system, it is spouted as giving meaning to your life, to give you dignity and to give you a decent standard of living. Of course experience tells us none of this is near the truth. Under the capitalist system, work is exploitation, maintained at the lowest wage rate the employer can get away with.There is also the fact that health and safety is seen as eating into their profits, so will be by-passed when and where possible. One thing that is never mentioned, under these conditions, work is often a killer, not just from avoidable "accidents" but also from industrial diseases. The corporate powers are without doubt, in many cases, guilty of corporate manslaughter, all in the name of profit. Under no circumstances should your occupation be a possible death sentence. However, not until all manufacturing and distribution is under the control of the those who work their, will this corporate manslaughter stop. The interests of the corporate bosses and those of the workers are diametrically opposed, the circle can't be squared. 

         IndustriALL Global Union’s Korean affiliate the KMWU believes that POSCO workplaces will only become safer when union representatives are able to participate fully in safety structures. Instead, POSCO recently dismissed three union activists for exposing union busting, and failed to reinstate them after the National Labor Relations Commission ruled that the dismissal was unfair.
       The KMWU argues that large-scale industrial disasters happen at POSCO due to management decisions to not upgrade aging facilities and equipment, to downsize subcontracted workers, and to outsource risks instead of eliminating them.
      POSCO blocks the KMWU from accessing accident sites and refuses to allow union safety experts to participate in accident investigation. The company fails to disclose the true cause of an accident after an investigation is concluded, leaving workers to face the same risks that killed their colleagues.
      South Korea has the highest occupational fatality rate among OECD countries and every year 2,400 workers die in industrial fatalities. In 2018, trade unions and civil society launched a campaign for a Corporate Manslaughter Bill after a young worker in his twenties was found dead in a power plant after the company violated standard operating procedures.
       The signatures of 100,000 citizens placed this bill before the Korean National Assembly. The intent of the bill is to impose heavy penalties on employers who cause the death of workers, and to ensure that they adopt comprehensive preventative measures.
         The KMWU believes that if the bill becomes law, POSCO CEO Jeong-Woo Choi should the first person to be held accountable.
        Accidents in November and December at POSCO’s Gwangyang steelworks in Korea resulted in the deaths of five workers. On 24 November, an explosion near a blast furnace lead to the deaths of three workers. In further incidents on 9 and 23 December, another two POSCO workers lost their lives.
      The lastest is the 18th accident in the past three years at the company’s Pohang and Gwangyang plants. POSCO workers have been killed by asphyxiation, explosions, fires, physical crush injuries, fatal falls, and overwork. The accidents have continued despite the plants being subject to an inspection conducted by the labour ministry.

       In this society we work to survive, that shouldn't mean we face death for our daily bread.work 

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Protect Our Right To Organise.

      Across the globe, the corporate fascists that control the various governments are working towards the destruction of organised labour. They are pushing their puppet governments to bring in ever more draconian anti-union legislation, while they rip up contracts, abolishing hard won rights that the workers have struggled for decades to achieve. It is a relentless onslaught. Cameron at the recent Tory Conference, announced that they would be bringing in more "de-regulation" in the work place, this translates as more anti-union laws. This is the twin prongs of the same attack on the ordinary people of this world, austerity measures, to reduce the wages, and the destruction of organised labour, to create that corporate world dream, a world of unorganised sweatshop labour. Every attack on our working conditions must be repelled, as they will not stop until we have nothing and they have complete control of a mass of unorganised, subservient, desperate, cheap labour.

 This from Labour Start:

     If your union allowed retired workers, or workers who were fired from their jobs, to be members -- would your government delegalise your union?
    That's exactly what's happening in South Korea, where both the government employees union and the teachers' union face the imminent threat of deregistration.
The teachers have been given until October 23 to change their constitution or else face delegalisation.
    This is a flagrant violation of international labour standards and represents yet another attempt by the South Korean government to break public sector unions.

They will not succeed.
    The Education International, representing teachers unions around the world, together with Public Services International, the International Trade Union Confederation and three Korean unions have called for a massive global online campaign of protest.
     This is very urgent -- if we don't act, the Korean teachers will no longer have a legal trade union by October 23.

Please click here to send off your message today:

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1995&src=lsmm

     If you share this link with your friends, family and fellow union members on email, Twitter and Facebook, it will help spread the word.
Let's send thousands of messages today to the South Korean president and let's stop the attempt to crush public sector unions.

Thanks very much.

Eric Lee

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

WHAT CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY?

      Western mainstream media is always on about the nasty North Korean regime and how it's people are not as happy as those lucky South Korean people who live in a wonderful "capitalist democracy". If only the North Korean's could see how wonderful things are in the South they would want the same.!!

     This is a video of the happy South Korean people celebrating their democracy during a strike called by one of its trade unions. It seems that we have to search far and wide to find a "capitalist democracy" where the people are not on the streets in confrontation with the system. Europe in turmoil, America Occupy Movement, the Middle East, the Far East and Asia, they all know the system stinks, is immoral, unjust and is corruption personified.

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WHO NEEDS YI BABY.

        It seems that one of those brilliant intellectual "think tanks", Centre for Economic and Business Research, (CEBR), have come up with a simple way of increasing the UK's GDP. According to them, the UK GDP suffers from to many Bank Holidays, simply by scrapping the Bank Holidays the country would be richer by £19 billion a year. Of course the question that might be asked is, by the workers scrapping their one day holidays, how much of that increased GDP would end up in their pockets? The same brilliant team also pointed out that South Korean workers work approximately 500 hours a year more than their UK counter parts and that country doesn't have the same "crisis" that we have. 

       In spite of the fact that the filthy rich in this country are getting richer faster than ever before, by getting an ever increasing slice of that GDP, they still believe that they have to get the ordinary people to work longer hours and have fewer holidays. They find it difficult to understand why ordinary people should have weekends off and enjoy holidays when they could be at work producing wealth for the parasites club.

      Think of all those hours you work just to survive at a half decent living standard and how much of the wealth you produce ends up in the bank balance of those who want you to work longer. Is it any wonder that they want you to work seven days a week for as many hours a day as they can squeeze out of you? Think how little you would have to work if that bunch of parasites were not creaming off the largest slice for themselves.

     For us to pruduce all that we need for ourselves, without all that surplus crap and without supporting an army of leeches sucking us dry, would probably bring the working day down below 4 hours a day, with as many long weekends as you wish. There is an army of non productive jobs that are there just to make sure that as much as possible is creamed off for the parasites and as little as possible goes to those producing the wealth.

      By reshaping society so that we produce what we need and making at available to those who need it, we would free up all those people in the non productive wealth directing and protecting organisations. This would  allow everybody to reduce the working hours and lead a more creative and enriched life.  We don't need to feed that army of parasites that insist on telling us that we are not working hard enough nor long enough, but they most certainly need you. To change the world all the workers have to do is stop, and the world comes to a standstill. What would happen if all the CEO stopped? Sod all, we don't need them.

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