Backward in Seoul

South Korea's president, Kim Young-sam, is coming under domestic fire just as he basks in North Korea's apology for its submarine infiltration. As in the old days of military dictatorship, the police under South Korea's first democratically elected civilian president are loosing tear gas on mass demonstrations in the streets of Seoul. This time the first cause has to do with a new labor law. But there is a second cause, a domestic spying bill, as well.

The circumstances of the labor law's enactment are themselves inflammatory. Blocked by the opposition from meeting at the National Assembly, the governing party secretly gathered its members at 6 a.m. on Jan. 2 and in six minutes and without debate rammed through this bitterly contested legislation. The opposition's provocation was considerable, but the government's contempt for fair procedure was more so. This is a caricature of democracy.

The labor law itself is no routine measure. South Korea needs to meet two competing purposes: to match its labor procedures to those accepted in the advanced democracies and to meet the competition of an ever fiercer global economy. The first requires an expansion of labor prerogatives, and the second an acceptance of a tough marketplace discipline. President Kim failed to convince his opposition that he meant to consult with them freely in order to ride these twin tigers. When he moved to end South Korea's lifelong employment system by allowing companies to lay off workers, he did not weave the tighter safety net that could break the fall.

The national security amendment that also was hustled through Parliament at dawn was an add-on that was bound to stir the democratic constituency. It was South Korea's pride just a few years ago to undo the harsh internal security restrictions that the generals had used to keep the political opposition down. Now the civilian Kim government pronounces this reform "premature". It cites the submarine incident and the "40,000 hard-core pro- North Korean leftists in South Korea" as reason to strengthen police domestic surveillance powers. But no serious case has been made. To piggy-back passage of the surveillance legislation on the labor law can only aggravate public anxieties about how the new legislation will be applied.

-- The Washington Post