Opening Address

 Kim, Jin-kyun(Co-chairman, Organizing Committee)

We these days beat high with the hope of dream that the ideal of one global village will seem to be attained under globalization and "information society". At the same time, it causes persistent suspicion from the whole world whether the global community to be one can make a bright future of our world or not. The new informationized and globalized era triggers indiscriminating emulations on the world-level. This phenomena gives rise to dismiss workers all over the world who have been working without uttering any complaints and coerce their employment situations to be unstable. Capital is wielding its power of a new advanced labor control on the ground of the developed information and communication technologies. These days, the awful trend like this apparently happens to South Korea and the attempt to introduce 'National Electronic I. D. Card' by government enables us to prognosticate the totalitarian control of electronic era. 
Now, in the cause of coping with the shifts of situation like this, we must scrutinize what influence the improvement of electronic communication technology have on life standards of  labor. Given to a project this time, the international event of "Seoul International LaborMedia '97" on the theme of "Labor Movement and Media : Worker, Information Technology and Solidarity" will be held to discuss cases as follows: the employment of some equipments of information and communication, video, radio, and TV to activate organization of labor movements, education for workers and invigoration of international solidarities. We have to probe the social background expected to introduce Informationized technologies prior to application of those technologies. Furthermore, it will be desperately requested that labor movement must analyze the fact that the introduction of new technology makes it possible the new type of labor and social control and forces the worker's life into underemployment.
Since the globalization of capital and production steadily progresses accompanying that of the networks, the democratic labor movement organizations devising opposite countermeasures against that have to be established on an international scale. The ideology called "neo-liberalism" is rebuilt with the ideology of electronic technologies improvement in that capital speaks highly of liberalization, deregulation, privatization and intends to intensify the dismissal and the control of workers on the name of rationalization and efficiency. On the international scale, the aggressive neo-liberalism is being made deep progress. 
A worker isn't absolutely a dead machine.  By means of the popular struggle of European workers and the public, they offer incessant resistance against the intention of capital that it tries to retrench the social rights based on durable strives in the process of building EU. In North-South America, workers and the public of U.S. and the Central/South America spread out struggle against NAFTA. The more consolidated the global order of the capital is, the more unified the global common opinion of workers is. The beginning of this year 1997, South Korea underwent the global common opinion of workers. Not only did the interior workers and the public on the axis of KCTU stand together, but also did workers all the world stand up for them during the process of the general strike in order to retract the retrogressive revision of the Labor Law and the National Security Agency Act passed without the presence of the opposition parties in the National Assembly at the end of 1996.  So they archived a victory in their struggle. The triumph of the general strike brought the necessity of communications among workers, more and more international communications home to us.
This event was projected on the basis of a few resplendent successes to be showed during the general strike at the beginning of 1997.  The international solidarity by the Internet and communication tools was contributed to strenuous exertion of TTGS and vigorous activity of "the Video Support Team" which distributed prompt reports including all the situations of strike in films. Their activities provoked condemns, jubilations and exclamations on the spot of labor movements in domestic or all over the world.  These effects enable us to meet together not by oblique connection but by direct one. On the point of that, the intention of this event is that we internationally hold these results in common and discuss how to organize them.
By reason of the first trial, we failed to prepare the perfect plans covering all the raised proposals but we hold this meeting to promise the progress of the future and to make an inception of international solidarity.  I wish this event will be significant chance by which we
internationally confirm the volition of labor movements and share the meeting of solidarity with each other. Also, I do hope this event will be a shore of construction of the international network in the light of labor movements and render an international brisk communication to be fulfilled through the international solidarity.

