This week in history: December 20-26

25 years ago: the strike wave in South Korea, Kim Young Sam

On December 26, 1996, South Korean workers launched the largest strike wave in the country’s history, which lasted until January 1997 in defiance of threats from President Kim Young-sam’s government, demanding the repeal of legislation passed earlier in the month that made it easier for employers to lay off Collective of workers and replacement of strikers.

The legislation was passed in a pre-dawn parliamentary session from which opposition MPs were excluded. The bill also delayed legal recognition of the banned Korea Trade Union Confederation (KCTU) by three years and gave security agencies greater powers to spy on and imprison political opponents.

Hyundai’s shipyard in Ulsan, the world’s largest, has been closed due to the strikes, as have all of the country’s subsidiary factories, including Hyundai, Daewoo, Kia Motors, Asia Motors and Sanyong. Tens of thousands of workers and students staged demonstrations in January in Seoul, Gwangju, Busan and the port city of Incheon. Riot police fired tear gas at workers assembled outside the main cathedral in downtown Seoul, where strike leaders have sought refuge, fearing arrests.

Officials from the KCTU said the strike would extend to hospitals, public transportation, broadcasting, and the banking and securities industries. There was a brief hiatus in strikes during the New Year holidays, but most auto factories resumed strikes by January 3 and the general strike continued by January 6.

The government took a hard line, formally implementing the new law by ministerial decree on December 30 and then threatening “legal countermeasures” against the workers. In a televised address on the same day, Prime Minister Lee Soo-sung said the law is necessary to keep South Korea competitive with other countries where employers have more freedom to lay off workers.

The government ordered 20 union leaders to report to the public prosecutor for interrogation, but they refused and expected to be arrested. The Confederation of Employers has announced that it will sue the TUC for strike compensation, demanding a $400 million blocking legal ruling against the union.

The officially recognized Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), which initially allowed strikes in an unprecedented joint action with the KCTU, sought to take advantage of the New Year holiday to engineer an end to the protests, and called for the suspension of strikes until January 11 which workers ignored.

50 years ago: Nixon commutes Jimmy Hoffa’s prison sentence, photographed by Jimmy Hoffa in 1965

On December 23, 1971, US President Richard Nixon commuted the prison sentence of former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. Nixon authorized Hoffa’s release on the condition that he not participate in the “direct or indirect management of any labor organization” until the remaining time of his 13-year sentence had expired.

At the time of his release, Hoffa had served about a third of his sentence, which would have expired in March 1980. He had been convicted of pension fraud and jury tampering. His arrest and conviction in 1964 was the result of the years-long “Get Hoffa” campaign started by Robert Kennedy, the then US attorney general.

Hoffa, in his role as a Teamster bureaucrat, was a highly corrupt character with deep ties to organized crime. In addition, he played a leading role in the anti-communist purge of Trotsky’s local task force 544 in Minneapolis which launched a hugely successful general strike of 1934. In 1941, Hoffa, under the direction of then-Timster President Daniel Tobin, went to Minneapolis to take out the socialist leadership. Hoffa and Tobin fully cooperated with the Roosevelt administration to persecute the Trotskyists under the Smith Act as the government prepared to enter World War II.

The campaign to arrest Hoffa two decades later was not waged on behalf of ordinary workers, who suffered more than intimidation from mafia thugs who regularly defeated opposition to Hoffa and other bureaucrats. Rather, it was an attempt by the state to dismantle and demoralize the workers by decapitating the union and appointing representatives to the organization who would be more reliable in quelling the growing strike wave amid the inflation crisis.

In previous decades, Teamsters has grown into a hugely important organization with a good reputation among workers for fighting a fierce battle for better living standards. For this reason, it has been targeted by successive presidential administrations.

Commenting on Hoffa’s release, the Bulletin, the US predecessor to the World Socialist Web site, wrote, “Hoffa’s imprisonment was in fact the first shot in this attack by employers on American workers, which today takes the form of a wage freeze, payment board and devaluation.”

Hoffa’s release by Nixon was intended to appease workers who increasingly saw his arrest as a political attack and were seeking a political response. Additionally, Teamsters officials in recent years have sought an alliance with Nixon. The Teamsters bureaucrats who sat on Nixon’s pay board for the pay freeze were known as the most active contributors to his attacks on pay. Hoffa’s release was a reward for this class for their obedience to the Nixon administration’s attacks on the strikers and for their defense of capital gains.

75 years ago: Great earthquake, tsunami hit southern Japan Devastation from Nankai earthquake

On December 21, 1946, southeastern Japan was hit by a powerful earthquake that triggered a devastating tsunami. At least 1,362 people were killed, 100 were missing and never found, and about 2,600 were injured.

The earthquake, with a magnitude of between 8.1 and 8.4 on the moment magnitude scale, hit the Nankaido region in the early hours of the morning. An estimated 36,000 homes have been flattened in southern Honshu, Japan’s largest island, and on the nearby island of Shikoku. Another 2,100 homes were swept away within hours, as a 16- to 20-foot tsunami hit the east coast of Honshu, the Kii Peninsula and the south coast of Shikoku.

The affected area is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes, and is located on the Nankai Basin. The trough represents the subsidence of the Philippine Sea Plate below the Eurasian Plate. It has been the site of powerful strong earthquakes, where one tectonic plate is pushed under the other.

Two years before the 1946 earthquake, the Tunkai earthquake hit the same area. It also measured 8.1 on the Richter scale, making it the most powerful earthquake anywhere in the world in 1944. The Tunkai also flattened thousands of homes, killed 3,358 people and triggered a tsunami.

The December 1946 earthquake occurred just over a year after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as part of the criminal scorched earth policy pursued by American imperialism in the final stages of World War II. Much of the country’s basic infrastructure still needed to be rebuilt, while there was widespread popular anger over chronic food shortages, excessive prices and the authoritarian rule bolstered by the occupying US military.

100 years ago: Eugene Debs was released from prison.

On December 25, 1921, at 11:30 a.m., Eugene F. served time.

Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act — the same reactionary law under which Julian Assange would be prosecuted if extradited to the United States — for giving an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918. It was the height of the government’s hunt for witches against socialists and others who opposed the entry America in World War I.

He began serving time in April 1919. In the 1920 election, he ran for president from prison, receiving 919,799 votes, more than 3 percent of those.

The New York Times reported that when Debs left prison, “Cheers erupted from among the prisoners. Debs raised his hat with one hand and crutch with the other and waved at them. He continued to wave as they continued to cheer him on until he reached the gate.”

Debs then went to the railroad station where he refused to travel to his home in Terry Haute, Indiana, in his luxury Pullman, but instead took modest accommodations. Donate the difference in fare to a starvation relief fund in Soviet Russia. “I left 2,300 men there, and they should all be given their freedom,” he told the press at the station.

On his way to Terre Haute he stopped in Washington, D.C., where he was received by President Harding at the White House. Upon arriving at Terre Haute, he was greeted by a crowd of 50,000.

But Debs’ health was disrupted by his confinement as he struggled to get it back, and he died only five years later in 1926.

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